Gihan Abouzeid

I grew up in Mansoura, Egypt. My father, a textile engineer, died young, and I was raised by my mother and my dictator grandmother. In adolescence, I joined a revolutionary feminist group Bint Al-Ard that received international attention at the time, being established in a conservative city outside the capital. It was able to attract the attention of pioneering feminists such as Angela Davis, who came to Egypt to visit those revolutionary girls who called themselves "Daughters of the Earth." For ten years, the rigorous reading program in Bint Al-Ard formed my intellectual foundation and contributed to a profound degree in crystallizing the concepts of justice, rights, equality, domination, and tyranny.

During this period, I also got a BA in chemistry and geology and worked as a chemist in a water analysis laboratory for two years.

I then earned a master’s degree in educational psychology and did extensive supervised teaching. After finishing, I never formally worked as a teacher, but it certainly benefited me to the maximum extent in my work as a trainer now.

I became very active in the field of human rights, with a focus on women's rights, perhaps in response to the discrimination that I was subjected to, like all girls, and also to my desire to change this dominant cultural system. My work allowed me to get acquainted with the reality of the villages in Egypt and the countries of the Arab region, and I came to recognize the various patterns of exclusion, as well as ways to resist domination in its various dimensions.

Much of this process of identifying the Arab cultural and political reality came from my work as a social science researcher. I was fascinated by field studies that provided me with the opportunity to discover both new knowledge and human treasures, through deep and detailed ethnographic investigations of Arab culture. This helped me understand the complexity of social systems as well as the extent of their cruelty.

I have worked as a researcher in 18 Arab countries and as a trainer—mainly with United Nations organizations—in 20 Arab countries and Germany. Working as a trainer with a research background makes the training process more enjoyable and becomes a research case in itself. I look at the trainees' reactions according to gender, age, education, and social status. Training has become for me a continually renewed well of knowledge.

I mainly work on building the capacity of organizations to be effective and foster diverse leadership, especially in terms of gender relations. This often means empowering the most marginalized groups—women, informal labor, sex workers, and persecuted ethnic groups—through organized training programs and also through networks to which I belong as an activist. 

In the last ten years, I began (with the protection and support of United Nations organizations) to work with parliamentarians and some Arab governments, including Egypt, to train policymakers on different strategies to integrate marginalized groups into policies