Middle East businesswomen get help in careers from U.S.

Beirut – Being a young woman trying to forge a career in business can be difficult enough at the best of times.

But when you’re trying to do so in Iraq — or perhaps Saudi Arabia, or the West Bank — it can seem like a near-impossible task.

This month, however, 41 young females leaders in business, and in
law, from around a dozen countries and territories in the Middle East
and North Africa are in the United States to get some of the very best
academic help available.

A group of them are spending a month taking a specially-designed
executive education program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School of Business, something to be followed by a five-month internship
with a leading U.S. corporation.

Their peers in the legal field are receiving similar training at the
university’s law school, to be followed by their own internships at
major firms.

The women, aged between 22 and 32, are the latest group to benefit
from what is formally known as the Legal and Business Fellowship
Program, or LBFP, funded by the U.S. government’s Middle East
Partnership Initiative, part of the State Department, and run in
association with different business schools each year.

In 2004, during the first incarnation of the program, which is
organized by the non-profit group America-Mideast Educational and
Training Services, 22 woman studied at the Fuqua School of Business,
part of Duke University in North Carolina.

Welcome respite

For a few of those initial participants, as with the latest group,
the program offers more than a just a chance to learn more about U.S.
and international business methods — at Duke, three of the women were
from Iraq and two were Palestinian, meaning they were also getting
away, for a period, from conflict and violence.

Duke hosted another group of women on the program last year, while
others studied at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in
Atlanta.

The LBFP is open to women from 16 countries at territories –
Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, West
Bank and Gaza, and Yemen.

Many women struggle to forge business careers in these places, where
traditional customs and beliefs can often discriminate heavily against
them.

Change is happening, if slowly, even in the most conservative
states. Women can point to the success of some peers, for example Dr
Nehad Taher, senior economist at Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial
Bank and Elham Hassan, senior partner with accountancy giants
PricewaterhouseCoopers in Bahrain.

However, such stories remain uncommon, making initiatives like the LBFP all the more valuable.

“The Middle East Partnership Initiative supports the aspirations of
people in the region seeking greater freedom and opportunity,” U.S.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scott Carpenter said of the latest
program.

“This impressive group of women embodies these aspirations, and we
are happy to stand with them as they develop new business and legal
skills to help their communities flourish.”

There are also benefits for the schools involved, according to Sandhya Karpe, senior director of executive education at Wharton.

“Gathering such a large group of women from a wide variety of
countries will encourage information-sharing, networking, and
bridge-building among the participants and faculty. It is from such
unique opportunities that great ideas –and change — can emerge,” she
said.

Source:Ya Libnan

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