Rasha gave us an insight to the challenges of life in Gaza, Palestine. A city with over 2 million people in 365km2 with frequent conflicts and spent 13 years under blockade.
Raising a young family of three, Rasha could see a need to create meaning working work for woman. After attaining degrees in Information technology, Strategic business management, and system change she lectured and worked with NGO’s. Rasha was then inspired to co 150 an NGO called GGateway that went on to train over 1000+ people and create over 300 long term jobs.  The goal is to continue to create a more inclusive, supportive, empowered world for herself, her young family, and for the trapped generation of youth within Palestine. The organisation has recently been funded from the world bank of $3million to help secure the future of the NGO.
In 2018, she was featured as a next-generation leader in Time Magazine.
In Sep 2020, her business has been recognised as one of the global SDG & Her 2020 award winners. Last year she received an Edmund Hillary Fellowship Fellow focusing on creating global impact from Aotearoa New Zealand. Rasha has been living in Dunedin for 1 year where her sister is living who has recently finished her phD.
Rasha recently founded with another EHF fellows an initiative He Ao Kotahi - A Maori based leadership for youth.

 

We also heard from Dr. Marissa Kaloga of Otago University who is lecturer in the Social and community work programme.  She spoke about her project she is working on with Rasha carrying out community-based research in collaboration with Startup Dunedin.
 It aims at understanding the barriers to small business development for minority communities in Dunedin and to create evidence-based interventions to support new business development from diverse populations. The plan is the pilot this in Dunedin before rolling this out to other regions.

 

Rasha is going to speak at RYLA in January in Queenstown. She has presentations on resilience in leadership and will no doubt inspire all that hear her speak at RYLA.