Saskatoon native makes Forbes list
SASKATOON• Jon Stewart called her“the Libyan Doogie Howser.”
The late dictator Moammar Gadhafi added her to the list of the 11 Most Wanted Women in Zawiya.
This week, Forbes magazine named the Saskatoonborn Dr. Alaa Murabit to its prestigious 30 Under- 30 list for 2017.
“Just about the best email to get at 9 a.m. in the new year,” Murabit, who now lives in New York City, wrote on Facebook.
Murabit, 27, was included among 30 men and women in the health- care category of the annual listing that highlights what the publication calls “game changers” in 20 industries.
It recognizes her work as a United Nations commissioner on health employment and economic growth.
The sixth of 11 children born to a doctor and his wife in Saskatoon, Murabit moved with her family to Libya when she was 15. That year, she was admitted to the University of Zawiya to study medicine.
She noticed how male students were promoted as future ministers and doctors and females were overlooked. She petitioned the university to allow women to sit on student council, then considered illegal.
“I started realizing that regardless of how much I studied, or how much smarter I was than my male classmate, his opinion always trumped mine,” she told the CBC in 2014.
“I felt very much robbed of my own opportunity and my own rights.”
In her final year at the university, she founded The Voice of Libyan Women, anon-profit focused on women’ s rights in the country. The group got the attention of Gadhafi, whose 40- year regime was under siege in a civil war. He added her name to Zawiya’s most wanted. She hid but did not go silent.
“I never had any intention of being an advocate,” said Murabit in the 2014 interview.
“My parents never made any distinction between me and my brothers. That was extremely important to the way I looked at the world.”
She has become an advocate for women’s rights and is a founding member of Harvard University’s Everywoman, Everywhere initiative. In 2014 she became an adviser to the UN Women’s Global Civil Society Advisory Group.
“I’m incredibly grateful and humbled,” she wrote of the Forbes recognition on Facebook.
“It’s an honour to be recognized f or my work in health in particular, especially alongside a class of such incredible and inspiring leaders.”
Murabit said she’s had the honour of “intersecting my passions for health, security, policy and women’s rights into policies, legislation and global and national governance strategies which affect billions of people globally and will continue to do so over the coming decades.”