ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Join us where we welcomed the Women behind Manara!
'Manara' deriving from an Arabic name meaning light- Laila & Iliana truly are beacons of light.
With a mission to unlock the human potential of the Middle East and North Africa, Manara are building a community committed to diversifying the global tech sector while uplifting the economies of the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on Palestine and women.
Laila Abudahi is CTO and Co-Founder of Manara, a social impact start-up connecting talented developers from the Middle East and North Africa to global job opportunities. Manara focuses especially on Palestine and female developers.
Lalia was born and raised in Gaza, where she graduated with a degree in computer engineering from Al-Azhar University, she hacked her way from Gaza into becoming a software engineer at top tech companies in Silicon Valley, working at Nvidia as a senior software engineer building autonomous vehicles.
Iliana Montauk is a Polish-American who started studying Arabic at the age of 17. She has worked at Google and Upwork, where she was a product manager in charge of the supply side of the largest talent marketplace in the world. Before Manara, she co-founded and directed Gaza Sky Geeks, a startup accelerator & tech hub in Gaza run by Mercy Corps and funded by Google. While she was there, she ran the largest crowdfunding campaign in the history of the Arab region and increased women’s participation in talent pipeline activities from 25% to 49%. She holds a BA from Harvard and is a Fulbright Fellow.
Tune in to find out more about the amazing work Manara is carrying out.
