Honouring Women Who Inspire Us
In our mission to strengthen digital resilience, we share a path with many remarkable women. They are partners, champions and beneficiaries around the world. And on this International Women’s Day, we salute their leadership and commitment.
We’re thinking about champions like Nadia and Rania. Last summer, Nadia co-led a cohort of 18 Jordanian women through a four-month Salam@ program on digital resilience and advocacy. Their ranks included Rania, an accomplished journalist. And by November, Rania was launching a national network to combat digital gender-based violence (GBV) against journalists. Already, more than a third of Jordan’s accredited female journalists call themselves members.
We’re thinking about effective leaders like Lina, Salma, Fatima, Nada, Tanzina and Hanan. As regional and national coordinators with programs like Salam@, ARC and Siraj, they’ve shaped the conversation about digital resilience across the Middle East and North Africa. They’ve empowered countless women and girls to recognize and resist a growing array of digital harms. And they’ve pioneered new ways of ensuring digital-GBV survivors get the psychosocial support they need.
We’re thinking about inspired builders like Trang, who heads a longstanding partner NGOs in Vietnam. For years, she’s helped at-risk women and girls become safer, stronger digital citizens. Recently, for instance, we partnered to support several organizations’ online-GBV awareness initiatives. From there, Trang and her team built something bigger—bringing project leads together with 76 government and civil society leaders, for a workshop that earned national media coverage.
We’re very much thinking about the incredible women at the heart of the SalamaTech team. Since 2012, this self-organizing group of trainers and community workers has helped Syrians protect themselves online. We’ve never been prouder to support their mission. Several team members lost loved ones and homes in last month’s earthquake. Yet they’re still out there supporting recovery and relief efforts—and helping women navigate new digital threats rising from the rubble.
It’s distressing to see female survivors targeted in the wake. In one grim pattern, women who lost mobile devices in the confusion are now facing blackmailers—opportunists threatening to post their private photos online. And as SalamaTech team members scramble to help, their stories are harrowing. But these are also stories of resilience. Even amid crisis, we keep hearing about women making the most of every resource, every shard, and making life better for families and communities.
Not only in Syria, but everywhere: We’re inspired by the resilience of so many women who keep moving forward over towering obstacles. We see them prevailing through challenges rooted in patriarchal social contexts, too often compounded by conflict, crisis and economic hardship. And today, we salute all of our partners, champions and beneficiaries who continue to model—for all of us—what is possible.
