Women of the UAE: Caring around the world

Changing lives strikes a chord within Mada Al Suwaidi, a vanguard of Dubai Cares’ many programmes. Her greatest reward, she says, is the simple gratitude of others.

Mada Al Suwaidi is responsible for evaluating and implementing Dubai Care’s philanthropic programmes in some of the world’s most impoverished and troubled countries. Satish Kumar / The National

DUBAI // Don’t be fooled by Mada Al Suwaidi’s age. She’s 24 years old, but as country programme manager for Dubai Cares, the Emirati travels the world, often alone, to monitor and evaluate multi-million dirham education programmes launched by the charity in developing countries.

In the past year, Ms Al Suwaidi’s trips took her to Ethiopia, Nepal, Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. She has led meetings with philanthropists, dined with politicians and shaken hands with business leaders, but the best part of her job doesn’t involve jet-setting.

“The best thing for me is meeting the children at the schools and the teachers and the principals,” said Ms Al Suwaidi. “When you go to visit the programme you really understand how it has affected them.”

Ms Al Suwaidi oversees 13 programmes. Each varies in size, but they all share the goal of improving access to education, whether it be by building a school, refurbishing an old one, installing water sanitation, buying books, uniforms or transport, training teachers or developing numeracy and literacy.

Even before joining Dubai Cares, Ms Al Suwaidi was helping others through volunteer work between earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education leadership and management.

“I’ve been always interested in volunteering,” said Ms Al Suwaidi, who is the eldest of four children.

“A lot of my friends did internships in companies and gained work experience, but I found myself always looking for volunteer opportunities.

“I worked with refugees from Iraq, and from Africa in Canada. I did day care for children whose single parents were alcoholics and I also worked with hospital patients.

“They were really old people who had been abandoned by their families. I’d go and visit them to chat, they’d tell me their stories about their families, sometimes we’d play cards, I’d read to them or we’d dance.”

Some of her best memories working for Dubai Cares have been made along the hours-long, bumpy rides she takes on the backs of vans along dirt roads.

“The schools are in very hard-to-reach locations and it does take hours to get from school to school, but then that is the exciting part for me,” said Ms Al Suwaidi.

Her first field trip was to Ethiopia, where Dubai Cares supplied food, clean water and deworming services to schoolchildren.

“When driving in Ethiopia, all you see on the streets are children riding donkeys and travelling for hours, for miles, just to go to the community water source and fetch water,” said Ms Al Suwaidi.

“The children, their daily routine, what they do from morning to night is mainly to go and fetch water and take it to the school, which is why we have a water sanitation and hygiene programme among other school feeding programmes and a health programme.”

In India, she was moved to see how the literacy programme helped young children.

“It was very nice for me to see because the teacher said before the programme started these students did not know how to read or even recognise letters. Just three months in, they could read stories,” said Ms Al Suwaidi. “And I’ve seen that, I’ve witnessed that when I was there. So, it’s like interacting with the children and seeing the smiles on their faces and their love for education and knowing that we provide them with that.

“Just the smiles, it’s something that you will never forget and always take back with you and share.”