Dr Al-Sharekh

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Event Information

Dr Al-Sharekh is the Director of Ibtkar Strategic Consultancy, an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House MENA Program and the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, and has held senior consultative and teaching positions in academic, governmental and non governmental institutions in the Arabian Gulf and abroad. She is a board member of several academic and non-governmental organizations, chairperson of the EU Chaillot Award winning Abolish153 campaign to end honor-killing legislations in Kuwait and the neighboring region, and the “Friends who Care” project for young girls (under 21) at risk within Kuwait’s social care system. She has been Visiting Fellow conducting research on GCC demographics at the LMEI, SOAS, Senior Fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Strategy Advisor at the Kuwait National Security Bureau, a consultant researcher at the Supreme Council for Development and Planning in Kuwait, and a gender politics consultant for UNIFEM, Freedom House, and the UNDP on academic and social outreach projects in Kuwait and the GCC. 

Dr Al-Sharekh holds a BA from King’s College, London and a Masters and PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where she has been involved in founding, funding and teaching “Islam in Britain”, a multi-disciplinary course over the past 11 years. Other teaching posts Dr Alsharekh has held include full time posts at Kuwait University, Gulf University of Science and Technology, the Arab Open University, and visiting lecturer at Uppsala University, Sweden, Fulbright Scholar on Women and Islam at Whittier College, USA and she is their CEC Distinguished Fellow for Engagement with the Communities (2017-2018). Her research won the Arab Prize for best publication in a foreign journal in 2014, and includes books such as The Gulf Family, and Popular and Political Cultures of the Arabian Gulf States, examining the persistent importance of family and tribe in modern Gulf politics and society. She was awarded the knighthood of the National Order of Merit by the French Government in 2016 for her dedication to improving women rights in the region. 

For the past year Dr Alsharekh has been leading Ibtkar’s Empowering Kuwaiti Women in Politics program, where 15 Kuwaiti women were being trained in political leadership, and the Women: Dialogue and Leadership program in partnership with the Konrad Audenauer Foundation, which took 10 Kuwaiti women leaders to Berlin in September. Under her leadership Ibtkar is the consulting partner of the Women’s Mentor Forum which supports women in the corporate sector and the ASAP Initiative which focuses on mental health awareness. She was chosen as one of the 100 most influential and inspiring women in the world by the BBC for 2019/2020.