WELDD leader featured on Al Jazeera Arabic News Network

Last month, a video featuring one of our WELDD leaders was picked up by the Al Jazeera Arabic news network by a producer at the Al Jazeera Center for Public Liberties and Human Rights.

The video features Mukramati, from Aceh, Indonesia: window, lone parent, and self-made community leader. Despite losing her husband to the tsunami, she has raised her daughter to be a solid, respectable woman, and alongside that, established herself as a key community figure in an environment that that finds leading female figures an eyebrow-raising anomaly.

Mukramati runs an organisation that finds and provides safe, clean water for the community and employs both men and women on an equal level. She sits upright, holds a determined expression, and laughs in the face of village gossip. A male worker from the organisation says, “in the past, before the tsunami, no woman was involved. No one at all. Now people from other villages ask us why we let a woman lead because that is not allowed. If a woman can lead us to development, then a woman must lead!”

“If it were under my control, I would have employed more women but I don’t have the authority. I can only support,” says the chairman of Majelis Adat Aceh. “There Is now a woman’s Kuechik,” he says. “For me, we are all equal.”

This inspiring story was picked up by the Al Jazeera Media Network—the multinational news source that has more than seventy bureaus across the globe. Known as the #1 Arabic news channel in the world, it has more than 4000 staff members across the globe, including over 1,700 editorial staff from more than 70 countries. Their programmes consistently make up 9 of the top 10 programs in the news and documentary segment across the Middle East and North Africa. They have received over 45 million unique visitors in the year 2013 alone, and, in total, more than 3.4 million people have downloaded the Al Jazeera Arabic apps.

The Al Jazeera video, originally from WELDD project partner Institue for Women's Empoerment (IWE), can be found here, and has been viewed almost 90,000 times, with a 100 shares and a 100 likes—a much higher average than the rest of the video on their page. 

Mukramati’s story is certainly captivating; hopefully, it has inspired one of the 90,000 viewers to follow suit.

Original video can be found on our WELDD gallery, here. 

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