The Princess of Asturias Will Study in Wales

King Felipe and Queen Letizia announced that the Princess of Asturias will commence with a two-year study in the United Kingdom. The princess will be attending the UWC Atlantic College of Wales in late August or early September. Along with her courses, Leonor will include an arts program, community service and sports.

Queen Rania Champions Education

Rania championed education in an interview with Harper's Bazaar Arabia. She spoke about the demands on her role as queen, wife and mother. The queen also addressed issues with social media platforms. Below is an excerpt from the Harper's Bazaar Arabia interview.

At its most base level, social media can be an easy tool for bullying, and as an outspoken woman in the Arab world, Queen Rania is wide open to negativity and criticism, which she handles with grace and insight. “Listening to criticism is part of my job,” she smiles. “It’s important to respect all different viewpoints, and sometimes it’s the people who disagree with you who are able to point out something you may have overlooked. But criticism is constructive only when it is based on fact. Sadly, in today’s media landscape, false information can become irrefutable fact in a matter of hours.” She admits that when she first stepped into the role of royalty she was reluctant to speak out or take risks for fear of opening herself up to scrutiny or attracting censure. “With time and experience, I’ve become more comfortable in my own skin. There is nothing more important than being authentic, saying and doing what we believe in, and owning our narrative. If we don’t, others will fill in the gaps on our behalf,” she says. “I’ve learnt that the path to progress is long, hard, and often thankless – if you let fear of criticism paralyse you, you’ll never make it out the door. The difficult choices – the ones we most fear – are often those that need to be made.That fear is there to let us know that they are worth it.” 

One of the most politically candid first ladies in the Middle East – if not the world – Queen Rania muses, “I never really made a conscious decision to be outspoken, I feel it’s something that I have to do because any voice raised against injustice erodes the power of that injustice.” She urges us all to follow suit. “I think it’s the most important thing in the world to be authentic, to live according to your beliefs and to speak your truth. Particularly at this time because the public discourse is dominated by hatred and intolerance and anger and fear, and so we need to provide a counter-narrative to that, particularly for people in public positions.” 

 

“A large percentage of our population are young and therefore with the right interventions, what we see as a challenge could become an opportunity for very quick change,” she says. The digital world also makes it easier to reach students, train teachers and modernise learning. In 2014 Queen Rania launched Edraak as an Arabic online educational platform for adult learners, who were starving for engaging digital content in their native language. Since then, Edraak has reached more than 2.2 million registered users. Last September, the platform was expanded to schoolchildren too, with the Edraak K-12 platform, which will offer e-curricula in all major subjects to Arab children everywhere. “We’ve already rolled out mathematics, and there is much more to come. The platform will eventually include thousands of Arabic instructional videos, quizzes, and practice exercises covering everything our children learn in schools, all available free of charge to anyone with an internet connection,” Her Majesty says. The aim is to provide all Arab school-aged children with free access to quality education by 2020, whether they are in urban centres, refugee camps or conflict zones. “It is a tremendous undertaking, but it is one that our region cannot afford to put off,” she says. “A child denied an education is not a tragedy for just that child – it sets us all back. So we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to give them a fighting chance.” 

Queen Rania Speaks About Refugee Crisis

Queen Rania of Jordan spoke about the refugee crisis and education at a Google Zeitgeist forum.

Queen Rania Ventures into Social Networking

Queen Rania of Jordan recently linked up to the Twitter website to discuss the issue of education and tweet about some of the latest things that had occurred in her engagement diary. Now, she is taking Facebook by storm and encouraging dialogue on social change, education and cross-cultural issues.

Besides making inroads into the social networking community, she began her quest for dialogue to disseminate stereotypes on her YouTube channel two years ago. The queen shared her YouTube channel dialogue success in a NPR interview last month and said, “YouTube was an incredible platform for me to be able to interact and to hear the points of view unedited, unfiltered, you know, to just see - to get the real information…the idea was to create the debate. And people did talk. They did bring out a lot of issues. There was a lot of discussion, and there were a lot of friendships forged. And a lot of these stereotypes were exposed. And it's not until you really interact with the side, where you try to see things from their eyes that you start to empathize and understand.”

Photo: Petra

Queen Rania Joins Twitter Ranks

Queen Rania of Jordan continues her quest to connect and encourage dialogue amongst the internet community by interfacing on the Twitter website this week. As she disseminates the stereotypes on her YouTube channel, she steers the conversation on Twitter to focus on the Global Campaign for Education with the desire “to get every child an education.”

Photo: Petra

Queen Rania Converses Again with Wolf Blitzer

Queen Rania of Jordan recently appeared again on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer to discuss gender parity, education, and the quest for peace in the Middle East. Her last appearance on “The Situation Room” took place in the fall of 2007. The transcript from her October 2007 interview with Wolf Blitzer can be read here.

Below is Part One of Queen Rania’s interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

Below is Part Two of Queen Rania’s interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

Glamourous Royals Rania and Máxima Descend upon New York

The Prince of Orange and Princess Máxima of the Netherlands were in New York this week to participate in various panels and meetings revolving around water, sanitation and finance. On Monday, Princess Máxima took part in a panel entitled “Microcredit, Microfinance, Inclusive Finance: Building on Success for Innovative Solutions for Poverty Eradication in Africa.” Below are some highlights from her speech before the panel.

“During the International Year of Microcredit, the United Nations asked me and 24 other distinguished colleagues from a variety of professional arenas including finance, academia, development, government and the regulatory community, to become a part of a new Advisors Group on Inclusive Financial Sectors.”

“Our task was to identify and define the key issues limiting access to financial services and advise the United Nations and its member states on strategies and concrete steps to remove these constraints – a task we gladly took on.”
“Inclusive finance” is so much more than microcredit. There are more than 2.1 billion “unbanked” people around the globe - people who do not have access to even the most basic types of financial services that we often take for granted: bank accounts, insurance, savings, mortgages, money transfers and – yes—credit.”

Meanwhile, her husband, Prince Willem-Alexander gave speeches before various panels such as the Round Table on Health and Education, High-Level Event. Below are some highlights from his round table address.

“As chairman of his advisory board on water and sanitation I feel privileged that the Secretary-General offered me the opportunity to speak at one of the Round Tables, especially as he also allowed me to choose which discussion I wished to address. This shows that he shares my concern about the water and sanitation crisis, suffered by more than 40% of the World’s population.”

“You might think I am in the wrong room right now and should be speaking at roundtable number 3 on Environmental Sustainability which is where MDG 7 target 3 would seem to belong with conventional wisdom prevailing. I prefer a more unconventional out of the box approach and chose this Round Table – on Health and Education – to speak about water and sanitation because you cannot achieve the MDG’s in these areas without improving water, sanitation and hygiene. The lack of access to clean drinking water and proper sanitation causes lasting negative effects on the health and development of human lives. Those effects will only increase if we do not intervene…”

“The sanitation target is linked to health and education in so many ways. MDG 4 for instance, reducing child mortality: it is estimated that the lack of access to sanitation causes at least a quarter of all child deaths in the developing world. MDG 5 speaks of improving maternal health: the World Health Organisation calculates the impact of the lack of safe drinking water and basic sanitation to be around 529,000 maternal deaths a year. And MDG 6 is aimed at combating diseases: WHO estimates that improving water, sanitation and hygiene has the potential to prevent at least nine per cent of the disease burden.”

“Besides these synergies with health, we can see an unmistakable relationship between education and the targets on water and sanitation. To achieve MDG 2, universal primary education: by meeting the water and sanitation targets, an estimated 272 million school days would be recovered which are currently missed by school children suffering the effects of waterborne or sanitation-related diseases and related problems.”

Whilst the Dutch royals were expounding on their areas of expertise, Queen Rania of Jordan was fulfilling engagements close to her heart. She attended various panels, meetings and award ceremonies such as the Class of 2015: Education For All pledging summit , the Condé Nast Traveler World Savers Awards, the Global Campaign for Education event, the UNDP World Business and Development Awards and In My Name: MDG Call to Action event.

On Tuesday, the queen received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award at the Synergos University for a Night event. She was recognized for her endeavors in “education, health, youth, and the environment.” Rania was also praised for her core efforts in the areas of microfinance, family issues and cultural understanding.

For more information on Synergos, visit the official website.

Photos: ANP/Rene Clement, Petra

Queen Rania’s Painting Touch to a Primary School in Sweileh

Last month, Queen Rania of Jordan adopted four schools in Sweileh, Salboud, Ruseifeh and Sabha with the purpose to renovate and promote a “healthy educational environment.” She has proven to be a staunch advocate for education and she did not hesitate to volunteer some painting time to Khawla Bint Tha’laba Primary School in Sweileh on Monday.

The queen has stressed the importance of community involvement and private sector funding to improve the quality of educational facilities. Rania declared: “Education not only changes individual lives, but also benefits families, communities and future generations, and that is why we all have a stake in improving the quality of our children’s education.”

As a mother of four children, Rania knows the importance of quality education. The queen uttered, “all of us, mothers and fathers, want our children to have the opportunity to learn in a healthy educational environment. It is one of the most basic and essential things we can provide for them.”

Queen Rania described the value of education as an investment .“When we invest in education, we are investing in Jordan’s future,” she announced.

Photo: Petra