Nadia Al-Sakkaf


Nadia Al-Sakkaf is a Yemeni Minister and politician. She was the Co- Founder of the Yemen Times from 2005 until 2014, before becoming Yemen's first female Minister. She fled Yemen in 2015 after the coup and is currently a PhD Leader at Reading University in the United Kingdom. She is also known of coming from one of the richest families in Yemen. Nadia has a networth of around $7 million dollars USD as of December 2019.
In 2011, Al-Sakkaf gave a popular TED talk called "See Yemen through my eyes" which had over 3 million views.

Early life and education

Al-Sakkaf was born in March 1978 to Aziza and Abdulaziz Al-Saqqaf. Her father was a lecturer in economics at Sana'a University, a founder of the Arab Organization for Human Rights and founded the Yemen Times in 1991. She has two brothers and one sister.
Al-Sakkaf has a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from the Birla Institute of Technology in India and a Master of Science in Information Systems Management from the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom. She was a student member of Amnesty International. As of 2016, she is studying for a PhD at Reading University.

Career

Al-Sakkaf worked as a systems analyst at the Arab Experts Center for Consultancy and Systems. She joined the Yemen Times in July 2000 as a translator and reporter. The newspaper is the country's first independent English language newspaper and was started by her father in 1991. He died in 1999 after being hit by a car, although Al-Sakkaf and her brother believe he was assassinated for opposing the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. She became an assistant editor in September 2000.
Al-Sakkaf worked in Oxfam's humanitarian program in 2003. In March 2005, she became the editor in chief of the Yemen Times. In 2011, during the Arab Spring in Yemen, Al-Sakkaf and her staff participated in protests demanding that Saleh step down and played a significant role in reporting the Yemeni Revolution to the wider world. Al-Sakkaf is a member of the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate and the International Journalists Syndicate. She is an advocate for women's rights, successfully recruiting female journalists to bring a gender balance to the newspaper's staff and running articles on female genital mutilation.
In 2012, she launched Radio Yemen Times, an FM radio station which was Yemen's first free public platform for expression, broadcasting ten hours a day as an alternative to the state-monopolised media.
Al-Sakkaf was appointed Information Minister under Prime Minister Khalid Bahah in 2014. On 20 January 2015, when Houthi fighters stormed the capital and took control of all media outlets, Al-Sakkaf took to Twitter to report the coup. She later said, "I felt more like a reporter than the minister of information. I wasn't scared at the time but I was afterwards when I realised the implications. My name was everywhere. I had more than 20,000 more followers on Twitter in one day." In May 2015, Al-Sakkaf was living in exile in Riyadh as a member of the internationally recognised Yemeni government seeking to restore President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to power. As of 2016, she is studying in the United Kingdom, and continues to serve on the Yemen Times board of directors, as well as writing about the ongoing situation in Yemen.
Al-Sakkaf is the director of Yemen 21 Forum a development NGO based in Sana'a.

Awards and honors

Al-Sakkaf was the first recipient of the Gebran Tueni Award in 2006, given by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and An-Nahar Newspaper in Beirut. In 2013, she received the Oslo Business for Peace Award, an award chosen by winners of the Nobel Prizes in Economics and Peace and given to leaders in the private sector who have "demonstrated transformative and positive change through ethical business practices." She was recognised by the BBC as one of "100 women who changed the world" in 2013.

Publications

Al-Sakkaf is married to a Jordanian man and they have two children.