Haya Al-Moadhadi

Haya Mohammed Al-Farhoud Al-Moadhadi is a consultant in human development, empowerment and conference management, the founder of Al-Fursan Centre for Training and Consultancy, and an adviser at the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

She entered school at five because she wanted to accompany her sister, and both repeatedly ranked first. Family circumstances forced her to leave in the fifth grade and remain at home for two years. Hearing the names of successful classmates announced on the radio made the interruption especially painful, so she returned through home study, teaching herself most subjects and receiving private help in English and mathematics.

Marriage interrupted secondary school for another four years, but she continued reading and developing her skills independently. She eventually completed secondary education in the evening system and entered Qatar University in 1988 to study English, which she regarded as a key to other cultures. Work and study ran together for six years, much of that time spent in the university library, before she graduated in 1994.

Family supplied several models of learning. Her paternal grandfather taught voluntary service and standing beside people in crisis. Her father, a member of the Shura Council, showed her commitment to community work and allowed her to help prepare files, subjects and proposals. Her mother transmitted values through bedtime stories, and her uncle’s library introduced her before the age of eight to Al-Manfaluti, Ahmed Shawqi, other writers and thinkers, and Plato’s ‘Republic’.

After graduation, she remained at Qatar University, where she spent eighteen years in a career she associated closely with the institution’s library and intellectual life. A desire for renewal led her to leave in 2003 and join the Ministry of Education. She worked as an educational expert in the office of Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mahmoud until 2006, the year she completed a master’s degree in business administration at Adam Smith University in the United States.

Her husband’s health problems led her to request retirement in 2006 while her professional career was at its height. She had already been active in voluntary and community work for twenty-five years and continued her own training, but found no centre that offered the development she sought. That gap encouraged her to build an institution of her own.

She founded Al-Fursan Centre for Training and Consultations in 2004. Its early courses addressed conference organisation, protocol and etiquette, with the first conference-management course delivered in 2005. The centre sought a balance between commercial sustainability and community service, using events, conferences and intercultural practice as fields for professional development.

A women’s empowerment programme outside Doha became a five-year national project. The initial target was to graduate 270 women leaders; the programme reached 430 participants seeking to change the direction of their lives. Four cohorts of the Itqan programme also graduated ninety-four professional trainers who could contribute to the human-development pillar of Qatar National Vision 2030.

Volunteering began in primary school and continued through university, where she immediately sought opportunities through the Student Activities Department. Her humanitarian work included relief campaigns for Bosnian Muslims and initiatives defending human dignity. Across her administrative, technical and economic work, she managed fifteen empowerment projects serving women and other groups in society.

Projects included the Qatari Culture Ambassadors programme for future trainers at Nomas Centre, an integrated programme preparing Qatari youth for the labour market in cooperation with ExxonMobil and Qatar Educational Centre, the National Women’s Empowerment Programme and the ‘Thank You’ initiative for workers, launched in 2005.

Working at Qatar University while enrolled there was a sustained test of endurance. She attended English classes from seven in the morning, placed her student bag beneath the desk and began an evening shift as an administrative supervisor. The dual responsibility extended her degree beyond four years, but also developed the discipline that later informed her training practice.

Her approach to development centred on enabling participants to become effective leaders. After years focused on women, she extended the same method to young people, grounding the work in Islamic values and in practical responsibility towards society. Women recovering from divorce, widowhood, domestic violence and other severe experiences were encouraged to convert pain into purposeful action.

She compared setbacks to a table-tennis ball: the harder it strikes the ground, the higher it can rise. In training, the image became a way to explain that failure could reveal weaknesses, correct errors and create a new perspective. She asked participants to identify their strengths and limitations, define what they wanted and build an individual path rather than follow others.

Her advice to young women distinguished livelihood from personal interest so that a job outside one’s preferred field did not extinguish a hobby. She also urged women to recognise their own agency, maintain physical and psychological wellbeing, renew their goals as family responsibilities changed and continue serving society through knowledge, money, effort or time.

Continuous learning therefore became both biography and method: interrupted schooling led to university, institutional work led to training, and personal responsibility led to programmes that developed hundreds of women, professional trainers and young people. The centre and its completed projects translated that experience into a wider practice of leadership and empowerment.