Symposium on Women's Economics, Women's Right to Leadership

The inauguration of a new university chartered to grant degrees to underserved women in Asia will be celebrated at a Symposium in Dhaka, Bangladesh, October 17-18,2008. The Asian University for Women (AUW), based in Chittagong, will offer a five-year program of combined bachelor's and graduate-level professional training across the liberal arts, communications technology, management, public policy, and environmental science.

The initiative is funded by leading global corporations and foundations plus individual donors dedicated to educational opportunities for future women leaders and entrepreneurs from rural, impoverished areas in Asia.

Featured speakers at the October kick-off event include Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Muhammed Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank; the Honorable Dr.Fakhruddin Ahmed, Chief Advisor, Dr. Kamal Hossain, principal author of the Bangladesh
Constitution; Lubna Al-Qasimi, Minister of Foreign Trade, United Arab Emirates; and Iranian human rights advocate Mehrangiz Kar.

Principal funders of the Asian University for Women include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and USAID. Kamal Ahmad is President and CEO of the Asian University Support Foundation, the strategic planning and philanthropic arm of AUW.

The Asian University for Women currently underwrites the education of 130 women from six Asian nations as part of their Access Academy, a pre-university preparatory curriculum that will help the young women migrate easily to their first year of College in the Fall of 2009.

The Asian University for Women (AUW) is being established as a leading institution of higher learning for women from across Asia. Located in Chittagong, Bangladesh and master-planned by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie on a 100+ acre campus site donated by the Government of Bangladesh, the University aims to be the first of its kind: a regional institution of the highest quality, dedicated solely to women's education and leadership development, international in outlook but rooted in the contexts and aspirations of people across Asia, and offering an educational paradigm that
combines liberal arts education with graduate professional training. The principal institutional financial supporters of the project to date include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Goldman Sachs Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Citigroup Foundation, and USAID.

The mission of the Asian University for Women is based on the firm belief that education-especially higher education-provides a critical pathway to leadership development, as well as more broadly in achieving sustainable
development, economic progress, and social and political equity. AUW will educate promising young women from diverse cultural, religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds from across South and South East Asia and the Middle East -- with a particular emphasis on the inclusion of women from poor, rural, and refugee populations. AUW will enable its students to become skilled and innovative professionals, service-oriented leaders, and promoters of tolerance and understanding. www.asian-university.org