AUC students launch Heya initiative to empower women

A group of students at the American University in Cairo (AUC) have launched an initiative called Heya to provide women with the tools for realizing their untapped potential and to encourage the community as a whole to appreciate a woman’s worth in society. The campaign, called Heya, is divided into two phases. The first phase is an awareness campaign to be followed by a second phase intended to empower women to help themselves so that they might in turn work to reach out to support other women in the community. The term heya means She in Arabic.

“My co-founder Heba Hesham and I had a vision and wanted to see it materialize on and off campus,” said Yara El Razaz, co-founder of the Heya project. “We're not trying to dictate a certain template that we believe the ‘empowered woman’ fits but rather, to provide women at AUC, as well as women in our community, with the tools to discover that themselves,” she added.

The project aims to empower women in the community at-large by providing job opportunities and enhancing employability through small-scale projects. The launching semester will focus on workshops, lectures and campaigns with a variety of local and international influential women to encourage civic engagement in the community. A blog will be set up to feature a variety of discussion topics and interactive features for media uploads and dialogue.

Heya’s first on-campus appearance was the Heya Meen? Who is She? campaign that is meant to formulate an understanding of how AUCians view women. “Our question was simple, we asked Heya Meen? and then we collected answers on how people view Egyptian women,” said El Razaz. Responses were compiled and divided into male and female responses in a cloud map displaying all the responses. This cloud map was displayed during International Women's Day.

The campaign includes off-campus activities including tutoring and mentoring eight 9-year old girls at Amalna Orphanage in Nasr City. “Each girl is assigned two associates one goes on Tuesdays and the other on Saturdays - to tutor them in order to create a long-term older brother/sister relationship with the girls someone they will hopefully be able to trust and look up to,” said El Razzaz.

The students are planning three other off-campus projects to be carried out in the near future including organizing entrepreneurship program for women who graduated from public universities through providing them with English language and computer training. They will also plan a health awareness campaign in Shubra district to teach women about personal hygiene. In addition, they will hold a rehabilitation program for women injured or have lost a family member during the revolution.