RUMAITHA AL BUSAIDI
Omani scientist, activist, and athlete Rumaitha Al Busaidi empowers Arab women to step into spaces previously denied to them — whether it’s a football field, volcano summit, or the front line of the battle against climate change. Last month, Rumaitha debuted her TED talk that has garnered almost a million views worldwide where she looks at why women are more likely to be impacted and displaced by climate catastrophes -- and explains why access to education, employment and family planning for all women and girls is the key to our climate future.
Rumaitha has worked with the Omani government on implementing strategies to maximize social and environmental benefits in their diversification, and internationally with Clean Energy for America advising the Biden administration on developing a climate resilience standard for US foreign aid focusing on empowering women as a form of climate mitigation.
Growing up, Rumaitha struggled to find role models who represented aspirations she had of herself. So, she decided to speak up to allow women to dream big choosing radio and social media as her medium and for the past 13 years, and sheds light on this social paradigm. Consequently, she founded WomeX; a platform teaching negotiation skills to Arab women in order to nurture a new wave of girl bosses in the region.
Hailing from Muscat, Rumaitha recently was named by the World Economic Forum as co-chair of their Davos Lab Taskforce, the first intergenerational lab aimed at self-awareness, systems leadership, and allyship to help shape the world's post-COVID recovery. Rumaitha completed her Master of Public Administration at Harvard, graduating from the John F. Kennedy School of Government with a focus on enabling government executives towards innovation, and coined as the first female soccer analyst in the Arab World and youngest Omani woman to step foot on the South Pole.