Spiga
Watch Tawassol program on Future News this evening @ 7:00pm Beirut time
Mr. Khalil Abdelmassih
( Citizenship Lead for NEPA Region-Microsoft)
will be talking about Microsoft & Women in Technology Program partnership
In addition to Interventions with Nadine andraos ( citizenship Lead-Microsoft Lebanon)
& Nada Hamzeh ( Women in Technology Manager-Lebanon)
By Nayla Baraki
Special to The Daily Star
Friday, September 04, 2009
For one woman growing up in the backwaters of a tiny Baabda village in the 1940s, it was a fight to get a high school education. Being female, she was told from a young age that “no girls should leave the village for the sake of education,” and unfortunately, she listened. These early restrictions placed upon her are precisely what prompted Najla Abou Hamzeh to dedicate her life to empowering Lebanese women.
Born in Ebadieh in 1941, Hamzeh has been instrumental in founding the local Ebadieh Day Nursery, the first such institution in that part of Mount Lebanon. She went on from there to front local activism and international trade organizations, and even briefly dabbled in municipal-level politics. But the lack of support she received at the start of her life set a dangerous precedent for the rest of her career.
“In my day, girls weren’t allowed to leave town to finish their high school studies, and since we had no high school in our village, I had to quit school,” Hamzeh says. “I was a victim of traditions, since I was born in a traditional family.”
Hamzeh dates the beginning of her activism to 1977 – a surprising time – just two years into the country’s 15-year Civil War.
“In 1977, I attended the first meeting of the Lebanese Women’s Rights Committee,” she recalled. “That’s when I felt I was able to fulfill my ambitions and express several opinions and ideas that had been suppressed inside me ever since I was a little girl.”
She called the committee a constant source of support, as the group helped her “reach higher positions, and serve my cause in every possible way.”
Now Hamzeh is a serving member of a 15-seat executive board, responsible for taking national-level decisions.
One of Hamzeh’s major concerns is the economic dependence that women face.
“We are still suffering from gender discrimination. When women reach a state of financial independence, no obstacles will stand in their way and they’ll be able to achieve their goals,” she said.
“Lebanon will remain like it is unless women arrive at high-ranking positions and play an effective role in decision-making,” she continued. But while awareness is one thing, Hamzeh looks back on a record of activism as well.
In the height of the Civil War, Hamzeh said one urgent need was to help women gain this financial independence – if they had to stay home and care for children, it would never come about, which jump-started Hamzeh into founding a nursery in 1987, to ease the burden on working mothers.
“This [nursery] was established so that working mothers would feel reassured when leaving their children all day long,” she said. “There was no day nursery at the time in the Aley region of Mount Lebanon at the time, and working women were mostly teachers.”
She then set up a library in the nursery serving the needs of children from the ages of 1 to 4.
“The financial support all came from activities that we carried out, and [from] the members’ contributions,” she fondly recalled.
Read the rest of the article about Women in Technology on our website.
