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A little bit about me...

I'm a second year MPP at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Rawabi Fellow. I come from a multidisciplinary background that includes management consulting, financial services, public policy, humanitarian aid, and fashion design. Prior to HKS, I spent two years as a management consultant at PwC in their Abu Dhabi and Jeddah offices. During this two-year period, I worked with governmental entities on issues centered around public safety. I also spent three years auditing banks and other financial institutions at PwC in Qatar as part of their Assurance Practice.

 

I have always had a passion for public service and started a socially-motivated women's fashion brand specializing in a unique blend of traditional and modern wear for Middle Eastern dresses including Abayas to raise money for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment for Syrian and Palestinian refugees.

 

I completed my undergraduate degree at McGill University where I majored in accounting. At HKS, I have been involved in a number of extracurricular activities including Co-chairing the Women in Power Conference, Leading the Arab Caucus and Vice-chairing the Student Public Service Collaborative.

Here's a short video summarizing my internship experience. Please note, if the audio does not work in the video for you, please play the audio file below. 

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Blog Post 1

 

This summer, thanks to the generous support of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, I'll be interning with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific on their Catalyzing Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme!

 

The CWE programme is a US$10 million dollar initiative, funded by the Government of Canada, aimed at addressing three key overarching barriers faced by women entrepreneurs: (1) enabling policy environment and regulatory challenges, (2) access to finance, and (3) skills building and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by women entrepreneurs. The implementation of the activities of this program will ensure that systemic impacts are achieved, ultimately creating an inclusive financial ecosystem for women entrepreneurs.

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The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) is the largest and highest-level United Nations intergovernmental body serving the Asia-Pacific region. As an organization, ESCAP provides an intergovernmental forum for its member States to promote regional cooperation and collective action to advance regional priorities and the achievement of the SDGs.

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Blog Post 2

 

On May 11th, UNESCAP partnered with Kiva to host a webinar entitled "Catalyzing Financial Innovation for Women: Insights from KIVA-ESCAP Partnership." The webinar proceeded with an overview of the research that Kiva is undertaking, with the support of ESCAP. The research was undertaken to better understand the barriers faced by women entrepreneurs in Cambodia, Fiji and Samoa in accessing finance and works to identify loan design improves to better service women entrepreneurs. These findings will also be utilized to help address the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 

ESCAP outlined its goal for conducting this research, specifically, to better understand the nuanced challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in accessing financing at different stages of their enterprise journey.  ESCAP highlighted that the research was to be action oriented, allowing for learning to be applied into new product design, tailoring of existing services, or identification of solutions which could better support women entrepreneurs.

 

The research was undertaken in partnerships with Chamroeun Microfinance Plc. a financial service provider in Cambodia, and South Pacific Business Development (SPBD) a microfinance provider in the Pacific. 

 

The research discussed at the meeting will support ESCAP and Kiva’s initiatives in gender lens investing – supporting their thinking and frameworks for investment. Both ESCAP and Kiva were pleased to see that the research is already being readily applied by Chamroeun and South Pacific Business Development (SPBD) in their current portfolios.

 

The research used a lean data approach. As a result, between 100 and 130 randomly selected women clients from Chamroeun and SPBD in each country were interviewed. In Cambodia, the sample focused only on Chamroeun’s women clients that had lost their jobs as garment workers, to better understand how Chamroeun can improve their services to this specific clients population. The study focused on three overarching research questions:
•    What challenges do women micro-entrepreneurs face in maintaining and growing their businesses?
•    How can financial service providers improve their services to better fit the needs of women clients?
•    How has Covid-19 specifically impacted women micro-entrepreneurs and how have they adapted?

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Blog Post 3

 

One thing I've learned about large scale projects ESCAP undergoes (such as the 

Catalyzing Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme), is how important and central partnerships are. The programme itself is funded by the Government of Canada and so there are regular steering meetings that take place with Canada and I got to prepare a report for the first meeting I was privileged to attend.

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We ran the meeting by each component area of the project detailing their wins over the term. For the innovative financing arm which I worked on, we were able to show that the innovative financing component had already met or surpassed the targets for the life of the project for 7 of its 12 indicators as of March 2021

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Blog Post 4

 

During my internship I was able to really immerse myself in two avenues: testing my presentation skills and my research skills. I was tasked with researching key demographic information for the countries of Bangladesh and Cambodia along with their respective financing data for women entrepreneurs, mobile phone penetration, the prevalence of electronic payments etc. in order to create infographics.

 

This exercise while sounding simple was incredibly difficult to complete as it required knowing the exact key words you need to find the source data you require. It definitely taught me how to be a better researcher but also how to be a better consumer of data. 

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Blog Post 5

 

A major component of the work ESCAP does is to identify donors and other financial partners to support the incredible work ESCAP carries out. During my summer internship I was tasked to complete a full list of funding partners and potential donors. It was an immersive experience because it required me to learn about structures and funding mechanisms I had never heard of. I never knew there were specific bonds and financial systems to influence impact investing in such niche and specific causes.

 

As I researched different funding options for the various projects ESCAP could source to impact their women's entrepreneurship efforts, it gave me hope that there are a lot of tangible advances supporting women start ups and this was an incredibly uplifting takeaway to take from this experience. 

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Blog Post 6

 

On May 25 ESCAP had their first InnovaTea. InnovaTea is a new channel of the Asia-Pacific Research and Training Network on STI Policy (ARTNETonSTI Policy) platform to share critical insights and practical means to design and implement science, technology and innovation (STI) policies for inclusive and sustainable development.

 

The open monthly webinars – which ESCAP plans to host under the umbrella of InnovaTea - are designed for government officials and researchers eager to stay informed about emerging ideas, effective practices, useful tools and key research findings to promoting STI to build back better.

 

At ESCAP's inaugural conversation on innovation policy, they explored how – together – they can develop a new vision for Asia and the Pacific to harness technology and innovation to build back better. For the inagural discussion, ESCAP had invited several leading voices from government, academia and civil society to give some pointers on this vision.

 

Importantly, ESCAP also invited all participating parties in the webinar to: 
a)    Share their insights on what should be ESACO's vision to harness technology and innovation to build back better.
b)    Tell us how ESCAP and the broader ARTNETonSTI Policy Network can best support them by replying to a short survey which was sent after this event.
 

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Blog Post 7

 

Throughout the experience, I was able to leverage my prior consulting experience as well as my policy analysis skills at the Harvard Kennedy School, to assist in the preparation of proposals on behalf of ESCAP. I assisted in developing slides for two proposals aimed at funding further aspects of the catalyzing women's entrepreneurship programme with ESCAP. We were able to draw on ESCAP's experience, network and incredible track record to showcase why ESCAP was the ideal partner to implement the necessary impact on the ground in their 6 target countries to deliver the access to finance to the numerous women entrepreneurs who have either started successful enterprises and need further funds to grow them, or to women with promising ideas but do not enough funds to materialize their business plans. 

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Blog Post 8

 

The experience was an incredible one that allowed me to see first hand what it's like to work in the non-private sector, which was previously all I had ever known. I loved being able to work with the target beneficiaries and partners to see the impact you're making in ways you can never be as touch in the private sector. I also loved having the ability to enhance skills I needed development in such as research and writing papers. It was also a plus to get to leverage skills I already have, making slides and concise pitches, but in a new setting where the overall objective was different. It allowed me to see how transferrable my skills are to the public sector and gives me an opportunity to realize that I may want to leave the private sector and use my skills in this different yet very exciting setting.

 

The project was incredibly enjoyable to work on and I got to meet brilliant people who were really invested in my development and made the remote work very enjoyable to the point that I felt like I was with them in Thailand!

 

Throughout my time there, we developed a progress report and I would like to share the incredible work that's been done by my team! As of today, a total of 7,205 women entrepreneurs have directly benefited from the programme through access to finance and enhanced digital skills to start and grow their businesses. Additionally, the programme has contributed to unlocking US$59 million in private capital to support women entrepreneurs, with over US$17 million of this capital already deployed.

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The innovative financing component has already met or surpassed the targets for the life of the project for 7 of its 12 indicators as of March 2021. Here's a quick snapshot of the results from one of my slides in the progress report:

  

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Thanks to the generous support of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School

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