King’s Academy is marking International Women’s Day, which falls on March 8, with an entire month of activities and events to celebrate women, including a line-up of inspiring guest speakers to talk to students about their career and life experiences.

On March 5, King’s welcomed guest speaker Dina Saoudi to talk to the student body in the Abdul Majeed Shoman Auditorium. Saoudi is co-founder of Seven Circles, an investments and consulting agency, where she puts to good use her years of experience in Silicon Valley’s tech industry as an entrepreneur, investor and consultant for startups. Saoudi also founded Seven's World, the philanthropic arm of Seven Circles.

In addition, Saoudi is the co-founder of Empowering through™, which she describes as “a new breed of social enterprise bringing together representation from all stakeholders — aid agencies, private and public sectors, academia, impact funds, and civil society to work together to support individuals with economic and social empowerment through a series of projects, programs, and initiatives.”

Talking to students about Empowering through™, Saoudi shared how the success of the initiative’s first project, a book entitled Empowering Women through Cooking, led to its replication — and the creation of various parallel projects — in over 20 countries, helping to showcase the stories of thousands of women.

“I’m interested in people’s stories,” Saoudi told students. Speaking about the power of stories, she explained the importance of getting to know people by meeting them and listening to their stories, rather than making assumptions based on appearance, background, religion or other stereotypes.

“When we see things in the media, we are told what to think about people who look a certain way,” said Saoudi, “but how many of us actually know them or people like them? How much do we even really know the people we see every day? Our opinion of someone before we get to know them is very different to the opinion we will have after we get to know them.”

Saoudi spoke about her experience visiting women living and working in refugee camps and how she hoped to “give back” to them, but by simply taking a moment to get to know them she discovered she had a lot more to learn from them than they had to learn from her. “We all judge, but we need to take the moment to get to know people, and know what shared values we have, and maybe the world will be a better place when we do.”

Also addressing the latest evolutions in technology, such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, Saoudi said that even in her field of work, it was impossible to know what companies and careers existing now would look like a few years’ time. Education of young people today should be different to how previous generations were taught, she believes. “That is the best thing that could happen.”

“Today, we should remember why we are on this planet, we should ask what makes us happy, what are we passionate about?” said Saoudi. “Be as creative as you can coming up with different revenue streams. We are all interconnected through technology — anything is possible. Know that you can dream very big, and know that you can change the world.”