Emirati entrepreneur Hala Kazim to represent Arab women at Google panel discussion

DUBAI // Emirati entrepreneur and social media presence Hala Kazim has been selected to represent Arab women at a Talks at Google event on the state of women’s empowerment and gender equality.

The My Voice Matters panel discussion, in association with UN Women, part of the United Nations, will be held next month at Google's headquarters in San Francisco. Other notable females to feature include women's advocate, Paralympian and actress Aimee Mullins; Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California, Oisika Chakrabarti, UN Women's representative who also launched the organisations' HeForShe campaign, and Rwandan genocide survivor, lawyer and president of the Women and Children Embassy Foundation, Arlette Nkurayija.

Mrs Kazim, 52, who founded Journey Through Change, which helps empower women through organised hikes and workshops, said it was an honour to be chosen for the My Voice Matters event as the representative of Arab women.

"I'm an Arab and they relate to me, the culture, the language," said Mrs Kazim, a married mother of five boys and grandmother of two, who has more than 63,000 followers on Twitter and more than 94,000 on Instagram. "What I have tried to achieve for women is to let women understand themselves and love themselves and take care of themselves. That's the whole point of Journey Through Change because it helps a woman to love herself and when you know how to love yourself, then you know how to be good to other people.

“To me, how can you give, if you don’t give to yourself? How can you love anyone if you don’t love yourself? That’s where I come – all these years I’ve been trying to tell all these women you can’t give to your children, you can’t give to your husband, you can’t give to your community if you’re drained, if you don’t know how to love yourself.”

The public is invited to take part in My Voice Matters, which will be broadcast on the YouTube channel Talks at Google, on September 2, by using the hashtag #MakeMyVoiceMatter and #MyVoiceMatters.