‘Daughters of the Emirates’ meet to unleash potential and do good
dubai — Unlocking the potential of the UAE’s young women leaders, a four-day girls summit was launched at Dubai Festival City on Thursday. Launched by Promise of a Generation (POAG) — a platform for discussion and action to make community impact — the ‘e7 Daughters of the Emirates’ programme was held under the theme ‘Women in the Path of Zayed’ and saw a number of influential speakers as panelists.
“Women play an important role as community leaders and drivers of sustainable development. Their contributions and leadership are central to economic development and the ‘e7 Daughters of the Emirates’ programme aims to convene annually to develop the future generation of women leaders in the UAE,” said Adela Acevedo Sarna, chairperson, e7 Daughters of the Emirates.
The programme welcomed its class of 2019 consisting of 35 participants — 18-25 years of age — selected from across the seven emirates. The young women, mostly Emiratis, will stay together until Saturday and will be trained in leadership skills. This will support them in ideation, development and implementation of social responsibility projects to benefit the community.
During their four-day programme they will get to know each other, bond as a team, brain storm and formulate their ideas based on POAG pillars — culture and heritage; educational and career; enhancing opportunity for less fortunate; environment and health and women leadership and family.
Titled the ‘UAE Vision Dialogue’ panel discussion hosted several influential speakers including Caroline Faraj, vice-president, CNN Arabic Services; Afrah Atiq, Emirati award-winning poet, and Reema Shetty, culinary entrepreneur and CEO of The Foodsters and philanthropist and Board Member of the BRCR Shetty Foundation.
“Our message is that you don’t have to have a degree, a pay check, a job or any backing to do something good. You can just get together and bring out your strengths and positives. We know youth wants to do a lot of good, and express their
Our message is that you don’t have to have a degree, a pay check, a job or any backing to do something good. You can just get together and bring out your strengths and positives.” Adela Acevedo Sarna, chairperson,
e7 Daughters of the Emirates
love for the country and what we do is just get them together as a team and enable them to make it happen. The next three days they will learn to discover their strengths. They will also be going out for field work such as going out and speaking about their ideas to people and testing out their ideas,” Sarna added.
Emirati poetess Afra enthralled the audience with her strong poem Sheraa, which in Arabic means ‘Sail of a boat’ which urged women to find their calling, their voice and follow it. “Such platforms are extremely important for young women to have access to experience, training and to have people who can guide them. It is all about creating positivity in the community.”
In May 2018, 35 girls graduated from the e7 programme after completing the development of community projects that explored child safety, digital health, local tourism, worker welfare and cyber bullying among others.
Suad Al Hammadi, an Emirati participant from the class of 2018, said: “Our project, Unspoken Smiles, aims to raise awareness in the community on the need to protect children from any form of abuse. We are grateful to e7 for giving us a platform to test and expand our social project that will contribute to safeguarding future generations.”