Global Changemakers

What was your first reaction when you found out you’d been chosen to go to Davos?
I was beside myself with joy and excitement. My head started spinning at the potential gains from attending the forum and how they would be assimilated into my activism.

What are your hopes for Davos?
I hope to learn as much as possible and acquire great ideas which l can come home, spread the message about and collectively lobby with all the organizations l am involved with to make my government put them into practice. This will hold more water because these are ideas from the top industry professionals. Hopefully from engagement with them l can convince my government to bring them on board from a consultative aspect\

What are your fears for Davos?
Getting too many ideas and not being able to implement them all!!   

In which area would you want to see more youth engagement?
Definitely entrepreneurship and the empowerment of women and the girl child in all respects, especially economically and politically.

How can you make this happen?
At the moment in my country, this has not really received enough attention in the media, there is a keen lack of collective bargaining. People do not really believe in the power of mass public pressure. With this in mind l will start with the media, this means talk shows, posters, road shows etc All of this concurrently with the more formal lobbying of petitions and so forth. The more pressure l can build the better.

What will the world look like in 2050?
For the record I don’t think we will all have small aeroplane-like gizmos in the sky as personal transport as per the Jetsons. However l do think that we will have made considerable progress medically and in terms of technology. Hopefully stronger protocols will have been signed in terms of climate change, that is our biggest global concern at the moment. Trade should also have advanced with the signing of more liberal trade agreements. Experts predict that India and China will be super powers so that should be interesting. Also notable is potential progress in nuclear energy. With the dwindling oil supply it should be interesting to see what l will be driving(hopefully a car powered by water). On second thought, with the recent launch of  Richard Branson’s “Virgin Galactic Space Jet” I might get to touch base with Pluto after all.

If you become the new UN General Secretary, what would be the first thing you’d do?
Re-strategize aid to third world countries: this means ending the “give a fish“ methodology as l call it. This current manner of operation lacks sustainability and is actually counter productive because it creates a quagmire-like dependency, clearly evident in the seemingly never ending third world poverty.

What quality do you like most about yourself?
My inexhaustible energy, drive and determination (okay that’s 3, bear with me).

If you could invite three historical figures for dinner, who would they be, and why?

• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: to me she is the liberation of the woman, no matter what colour, becoming the first african woman president  to me is by far the greatest achievement of all time in the feminine wolrd. She is the living manifestation of fruits of the struggles of feminists and gender activists. Liberia under her guidance has progressed exponentially and is well on its way to being considered a middle income country like Botswana.
• Maya Angelou: She is an academic of note. I admire her for her works of art, the wisdom that one can hear from the subtle bass of her elder voice. From her autobiographies, she has had nothing short of an extraordinary life.
• Warren Buffet: The father of investment. I have taken a keen interest in investment and the stock market, it would be interesting to hear his take on new trends in investment and where he thinks the industry is heading and how he does it all, being the maverick investor he is, investing in prospects which others deem too risky(some have even said ludacris), only to succeed everytime with his near perfect predictions.

 
If you bump into Bono or Queen Rania in the elevator, what do you say?
l would invite Queen Rania to host a conference for women in my country, l would aks her to liase me with the wolrd leaders who she has connected with to also attend and speak at my conference, especially the women such as Michelle Obama who was in Jordan early this year. I would aks her to also help with entrepreneurship for women and l would tell her of my project on the economic empowerment of women “take care of the caretaker and everything else gets taken care of“. I would also ask her to lobby for the inclusion of gender rights and issues in Jordan curricula from an early age to reach out to both boys and girls.

I would ask Bono to focus his work towards the economic empowerment of women through entrepreneruship, just as l did Queen Rania. I would show him the snow ball effect this would have on other social problems around the world and ask him to come on board my campaign “take care of the caretaker and everything else gets taken care of“. This would mean concerts to raise money to establish a fund for women entrepreneurs of which is my vision at the end of the day.