Esra'a Al Shafei

Esra’a Al Shafei, founder and Executive Director of MideastYouth.com

Esra’a Al Shafei is the founder and Executive Director of MideastYouth.com whose mission is to amplify diverse and progressive voices advocating for change throughout the Middle East and North Africa using digital media. She is also the founder of CrowdVoice.org, a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world by crowdsourcing information which grew at a massive scale after the Arab Spring.

In 2010, she founded Mideast Tunes, a platform for underground musicians in the Middle East who are using music as a tool for social change. She is a recipient of the Berkman Award from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society for ‘outstanding contributions to the internet and its impact on society,’ and is currently a Senior TED Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow. Her project also won the ThinkSocial Award for serving as a ‘powerful model for how social media can be used to address global problems.’ In 2011 she was featured in Fast Company as one of the ‘100 Most Creative People in Business.’

She is driven by her passion for civil engagement, freedom of speech, and employing innovative solutions to pervasive and persistent human problems. She is also the director of a series of international campaigns for rights for ethnic, religious, and intellectual minorities. Also, she runs a global campaign to free an imprisoned Egyptian blogger at FreeKareem.org.

Recently, her organization launched a website that serves as a bilingual tool for LGBTQ youth in the region: www.ahwaa.org and also launched a global campaign for the right to education in Iran: http://can-you-solve-this.org

In her talk, she will speak about their current strategy on using the internet for social change, the manner in which they target youth with music, animations and new applications. The vision is to create advocacy on the internet, bridging barriers of faith and geography to unite young people committed to fostering constructive discourse in the Middle East.

More about this speaker:

• http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/esraa-al-shafei
• http://globalvoicesonline.org/2007/04/12/arabeyes-esraa-al-shafei-your-one-stop-cyber-activist/
• http://www.freekareem.org/
• http://www.bahairights.org/
• http://www.mideastyouth.com/

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