Notes from Professor Rabia S. Sa'id

Africa lags other regions of the world in almost every sphere of development. In this blog, I write about what I think Africa can learn from the personality and leadership styles of Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović which the world witnessed during the recently-concluded World Cup. Croatia is an East European country of 4.1 million people that emerged as an independent nation on 25 June 1991 from the breakup of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The tiny nation surprised the world by beating many strong teams, including Nigeria (2-0), Argentina (3-0), Iceland (2-1), Denmark (3-2), Russia (4-2) and England (2-1), before succumbing to France (4-2) in the Final. The team performed like they were on steroids. Before now, I wasn’t much of a football follower, but I have wondered about what gave the hitherto unknown team the boost to overcome many football Goliaths. A scrutiny of the 2018 World Cup has, doubtless, revealed President Grabar-Kitarović’s leadership qu

UN Commission on the Status of Women Sixty-Second Session Attending the 62nd session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which took place at the UN Headquarters in New York from 12 to 23 March 2018 accorded me lots of information on the strides and challenges the world has made in the journey towards empowering women. Key learning that I took away from my participation in sessions include emerging issues and trends. Emerging issues that I observed include more actions on assertiveness on issues related to girls’ education, domestic violence and a more vigorous drive towards women entrepreneurship. There is a greater focus on women owning their own businesses and enterprise rather than aiming at rising to leadership positions in corporations owned or dominated by men. Empowerment of women and girls is now moving towards being their own bosses and building their own conglomerate, small businesses. As a speaker said “We have to co-elevate, not co-exist” Dr. Letici

It has been a while. A lot has happened. I will share photos of interesting events that happened in the course of the break: Conferences, the Eid celebrations in Kano, Northern Nigeria and many more. However, we will conclude the CSW62 experience, which we started. This time to make it more interesting, photos will be shared with short comments. Thank you for joining me on the journey, experiencing these events. 💕💖✌