Success Stories
Success Stories from Jordan
On a recent visit to Jordan our Scholarships, Conferences and Events Officer Ms. Suhad Jarrar-Browne had the pleasure of catching up with two of our Alumni. Ms. Jarrar-Browne spoke with both Rana Al Akhal and Tariq Younis about their experiences as MBI Scholars and about how their courses for their postgraduate degrees have influenced the work they are currently doing in their chosen fields.
Tareq, who believes in ‘music without borders’, studied MMus Ethnomusicology-Music of the Near and Middle East focusing also on Instrumental Performance: 'Ud (Arabic Lute). The course focuses on composing music while studying its origins and the factors that influence the development of songs, lyrics or musical instruments from nature to culture, religion to globalisation.
Tareq is one of our first Alumni to graduate from SOAS, University of London and when he graduated in 2002, he started an extraordinary journey. In 2003, Tareq worked with the Jordan River Foundation as Lead Consultant, responsible for the production of the soundtrack of a regionally pioneering educational travelling puppet show aimed at educating children against sexual abuse. He created and organized a full educational music awareness program for use by the Foundation’s children’s activity centre in the less economically fortunate areas of Amman; a project that makes Tareq proud.
Tareq has worked on the documentation and origins of music and its development. He has a keen interest in methodologies and approaches to inquiry-based learning and looks at urban style music with all its contradictions, as well as traditional music and folklore and the importance of documentation. Tareq worked on collecting, archiving and analysing folkloric children’s music in Jordan for use in the Family Education Programmme in coordination with The Information and Research Centre at the King Hussein Foundation. He is both a prolific musician and educator with a creative approach to public performance. His work varies from composing cultural songs and love songs in support of women’s rights, to film and theatrical productions, to school music curriculum.
Rana’s journey is equally challenging and interesting. Once she joined the LEAD programme, offered by Imperial College London as part of the Pakistan campus, in order to focus on aspects of Sustainable Development, she realised that working full time, being a mother of a young child and being an international postgraduate student all at once are far beyond any one person’s abilities. Rana had to quit her demanding job where she had been forced to use her frequent travel time on planes keeping up with her work load. For the next 18 months Rana enjoyed being a student mother although she still had very little free time. While on the programme, Rana joined the UNDP as a national expert on youth policy. Time passed and Rana joined efforts with another consulting firm then worked on a freelance basis before being selected as a Planning Advisor for the Minister of Higher Education. As the youngest and only female amongst 7 male advisors, Rana faced being underestimated by her male colleagues; but during the first briefing meetings with the Minister of Planning, Rana proudly stood her ground in a field dominated by men.
After these successes, Rana desired to achieve her original dream of establishing her own firm to implement all the skills and experience she gained from her postgraduate studies and the different professional roles she had held. MEDAL Consult, a management consulting enterprise specialising in Organizational Development and Gender Services, is her contribution to a niche market that understands gender concepts and the importance of gender equality and women empowerment. For Rana, she still perceives many challenges. As she told me, “as a woman it is easy to get clients, but on the other hand, we are not seen as equal to men in this field and we are not represented in any public or government organisation. For example we don’t have any representation in the Chamber of Commerce or the Chamber of Industry.”
