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As the “Arab Spring” occupation has spreading over the Middle East, women are seeing the promise of change and the ability to bring pattern and affect that change. Here we element eight women who will looked toward continue to influence those changes. Manal al Sharif spearheaded the “#Women2Drive” occupation in Saudi Arabia — openly defying the country’s ban on women driving.

Dalia Ziada, Egypt Director of the American Islamic Congress, founded the first predisposed womens’ organizatin in Egypt, is an award-winning blogger and says women’s biggest cross-examine is “how they see themselves.”

Maria Al-Masani, a public relations specialized based in Canada, founded the “Yemen Rights Monitor.” “My goal is to save lives by making it easier for the media to shine light on human rights abuses in Yemen.”

Yasmine El-Mehairy founded “superlative Mama,” an online parenting community for Arab mothers in the Middle East.

Lamees Dhaif is a journalist from Bahrain who lone the county alongside her vocal support of the Arab Spring protests resulted in death threats against her and her family.

Shahinaz Ahmed is the CEO of the Education For Employment Foundation. “One of the highest challenges facing women in the region is leeway of choice,” she says.

Ouri Fida is the deputy director and webmaster of the first women’s radio station in the Middle East. “We want to inspire women,” she says, “as mothers, as wives, as workers, as people.”

Danya Bashir is a 20-year-old bustle owner and two-time winner (and the only woman to win) of the UAE Young Entrepreneurship competition.

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In Egypt, women hold faced brutal treatment at the hands of the caretakers of the revolution — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Activists describe its handling of protests as ineffective at best, and malevolent at its worst. bear in March, when the military forcibly expelled protestors from Tahrir Square — the epicenter of pro-democracy protests — 18 filly activists were arrested, 17 of whom say they were forced to undergo “virginity tests,” (the military has claimed the tests were done to protect the army from possible allegations of rape).

Recently, hundreds of women from across the Middle East attended a conflict in Egypt to discuss how technology and the Internet, namely soiree media, can be used to protect and advance women’s goals in the region. The Egyptian-American pundit Mona Eltahaway moderated the conference, well-formed the stage with both arms in casts. In November, she was sexually assaulted and beaten by soldiers near Tahrir Square. The plaster didn’t preclude her from articulating her message: “The most revolutionary thing a woman can do is share her experience as if it matters.”

As countries across the region struggle to dismantle inequitable systems and build civil society anew, these are opportune a few of the filly “agents of change” who are sharing their experiences and hold no intention of backing down.

Manal al Sharif (Saudi Arabia)
Follow on Twitter: @manal_alsharif

Last May, 32-year-old facts security consultant Manal al Sharif got into her car in Saudi Arabia for a joyride — of sorts. And because, simply by driving, she was breaking the law. As her friend recorded her tardy the wheel, al Sharif harangues Saudi Arabia’s notoriously strict gender laws. She posted the video online the next day, helping to catalyze the “#Women2Drive” occupation of Saudi women who openly defied the ban on driving. She was promptly detained in jail for nine days. Al Sharif has since expanded her campaign to “My rights, my dignity,” which fights for women’s right to drive and the annulment of male guardianship (under this tradition, Saudi women must obtain permission from their guardian — usually a forge or husband — to work, travel, study, or marry) among other things. “We’re half the society, but we give birth to and raise the other half,” al Sharif says. “So we are actually all of society.”

Her fight has opportune begun. Next month, she and fellow Saudi women will apply for drivers’ licenses to push the claim that the kingdom’s ban on filly drivers is not explicitly laid down in law, but merely a retrograde custom propped up by friar rulings, or fatwas, from the kingdom’s conservative clerics. And if they are denied? “We will appeal,” she says defiantly.

Dalia Ziada (Egypt)
Follow on Twitter: @daliaziada

Dalia Ziada, 30, ran, but lost, in Egypt’s parliamentary elections as a candidate for the El Adl (“Justice”) party, a new party founded by young revolutionaries that espouses a moderate friar and political ideology. Through the party, she founded the first predisposed women’s organization in Egypt to promote political literacy and help empower qualified women to run.

Ziada is an award-winning blogger — whose website was censored twice under ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak — and a staunch advocate for women’s rights. As a child, she was subjected to filly genital mutilation. The practice was made illegal in Egypt in 2007, with the country’s top Christian and Muslim friar authorities also expressing unequivocal support for the ban. In 2005, research by UNICEF found that 96 percent of Egyptian women ages 15 to 49 who had ever been marital reported they had been circumcised. Ziada, the Egypt director of the American Islamic Congress, was recently named by Newsweek as one of 150 most influential women in the globe and honored by The Daily Beast as one of world’s 17 bravest bloggers.

“The biggest cross-examine facing women is how they see themselves and their role in the political, economic, and soiree changes going on around them,” says Ziada, who wears a headscarf and is an observant Muslim currently studying International Relations at Tufts University in Boston. “The spring cannot convert forth without flowers. And women are the flowers of the Arab Spring, but if they do not appreciate their own weight and societies fail to include them in democratic transformation, the end will not be nice.”

Maria Al-Masani (Yemen):
Follow on Twitter: @al_Masani

Maria Al-Masani says she grew up with an abusive forge who tried to marry her off at the age of 14. She is now a public relations specialized based in Canada and the founder of Yemen Rights Monitor, a nonpredisposed inroad for recording human rights violations in Yemen.

“Since I can’t physically be in Yemen, my goal is to save lives by making it easier for the media to shine light on human rights abuses in Yemen,” she says with warm hazel eyes and an unshakable poise that helped her win “Miss Congeniality” at the Miss Universe Canada pageant. She says her heroine is a veiled woman in her hometown of Taiz who walked up to a firing squad, urging them to put down their guns.

“My dream is that one day,” she says, on the verge of tears, “the president of Yemen will get in her car and drive to Saudi Arabia to shake hands with the king.”

Yasmine El-Mehairy (Egypt)
Follow on Twitter: @SuperMamaME

Yasmine El-Mehairy is the co-founder and CEO of superlative Mama, the first online parenting community in the Middle East that serves as an facts hub for Arab mothers. El-Mehairy says many Arab women grew up in a didactic culture in which they are used to being told what to do — especially when it comes to parenting. She hopes to change that through information, so that “the woman can finally choose what’s best for her.”

El-Mehairy says that oftentimes the main source of advice for Arab mothers is their own mothers and grandmothers. But in many cases, she says with a laugh, their experiences are outdated. “We’re witnessing generational shifts that hold ushered in more Arab mothers working and earning their own money,” she says.

One of the most popularly read sections of the website is called “Daddy Darling.” “In our region, most men aren’t involved at all in raising the children. They are the money makers but leave all the parenting to us,” she explains. “Many mothers want to share critiques with their husbands in an indirect way, so we thought the woman could send her husband articles from the website.”

El-Mehairy says the section has beconvert forth so popular with men that they now hold volunteer male writers contributing. “We are creating change without breaking cultural and traditional characteristics of the region.”

Lamees Dhaif (Bahrain)
Follow on Twitter: @LameesDhaif

“I convert forth from a county where a mother busted up herself because her son was repeatedly tortured,” Lamees Dhaif, a 32-year-old journalist, resolutely proclaims. “I convert forth from a county where protests happen every day, but no one talks about it. We are the women of the forgotten revolution.”

Dhaif is from Bahrain, a toy island nation between Saudi Arabia and Iran where the United States bases the Navy’s Fifth fleeting and where the Shiite majority has frequently protested its political and economic marginalization by the ruling Khalifa dynasty, which is Sunni.

When the Arab Spring destitute out, the Shiites, with some Sunni allies, took to the streets in huge numbers, demanding a representative and constitutional democracy. Dhaif, a vocal supporter of the protests, lone the county in March 2011 alongside sundry death threats against herself and her family.

“Women are punished doubly for speaking out– one time as a rebel, the other as traitor. If you protest, you’re called a prostitute. They used to censor my words, but I don’t care,” she laughs. She says the picture among of her followers on Twitter (almost 60,000) exceed the circulation of almost all Bahraini newspapers. “They can stop some now from telling stories, but they can’t stop us forever.”

Shahinaz Ahmed (Egypt)
Follow on Twitter: @Shahinazahmed

The numbers don’t always bode well for Egypt, the fourth-largest economy in the Middle East. The county is grappling with high unemployment, inflation, shrinking foreign investment, labor strikes, declining tourism, and foreign currency reserves that hold tumbled to about $10 billion from $36 billion. Forty percent live below the poverty line and unemployment in Egypt has hovered around 12 percent all year.

Sixty percent of Egyptians are 30 years old or younger, and at least one of every four between ages 18 and 30 are out of work. That’s where Shahinaz Ahmed comes in. Ahmed is the CEO of Education For Employment Foundation, a nonprofit that tries to help disadvantaged youth via market-based education. “One of the highest challenges facing women in the region is leeway of choice,” she says. “In order to hold such freedom, economic independence is critical.”

At the EFE, almost half of the job candidates are women. EFE provides them with instruction that qualifies them for entry-level positions with private sector companies. It’s been able to place 96% of its graduates in formal employment. “A woman’s salary in her helping hand-me-down at the end of the month part that she will owe allegiance to herself and not to anyone else,” she says. “It is that autonomy and empowerment that influences women’s independent choices.”

Fida Ouri (Palestinian Authority)
Follow on Twitter: @Nisaa_FM

Ouri, 23, is the deputy director and webmaster at 96 NISAA FM (“Nisaa” part women in Arabic), the first women’s radio station in the Middle East, based in Ramallah in the West Bank. Ouri, mother of one son, says she’s the only Palestinian filly webmaster. Born in New York and educated in Florida, Ouri moved back home alongside her studies in America to “create more opportunities and options for women.”

Ouri says about 70 percent of Palestinian women use the Internet, yet there is still a dearth of outlets designed to address their concerns. The radio station boasts sundry programs, including “Qahwa Mazboot” (“Coffee that is opportune right”), which discusses everything from proper nutrition during pregnancy to workplace decisions.

“We want to inspire women,” she says, “as mothers, as wives, as workers, as people.”

Danya Bashir Hobba (Libya)
Follow on Twitter: @ceoDanya

Danya Bashir is only 20 years old, but she’s already a bustle owner. She is a two-time winner (the first and only female) of the United Arab Emirates Young Entrepreneurship competition, helping her launch her company “Relora,” which focuses on stress management. But the biography on her Twitter account reveals her most lofty goal yet: “The next president of Libya.” Just last year, this seemed impossible in a county where Moammar Gadhafi’s notorious “Green Book” of political philosophy decreed that a woman’s place was in the home.

Born in Arizona and educated in the UAE, Bashir spent summers in Libya, but had limited contact with most people, even her relatives.

“My forge was a political exile on the blacklist, so I wasn’t able to fully connect to the country,” she says, deeming her forge her hero. “The biggest crime Gadhafi committed was corrupting people’s minds.”

During the revolution, Bashir organized shipment for medical treatment and basic needs in Libya. She says 57 percent of the population in Libya is made up of women, and they mostly played a role tardy the scenes — running weapons, smuggling medicine and gathering intelligence. With the gambade of Gadhafi, they are reveling in a new leeway to mobilize, but the male-dominated, tribally based society still has a long way to go. Though the county has witnessed a blossoming of dozens of nongovernmental organizations led by women, the 51-member Transitional National Council has opportune one filly member.

“They need guidance on all fronts, we are underivative from zero,” Danya says, “but the good thing about this is, people here in Libya are motivated and thirsty to learn about their rights, what it part to thoroughly be free, and how they can voice their opinions — we opportune need the place and people to help guide and teach us. We’ll get there.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_africa/~3/tIxjf-DslHI/index.html