InPics: The 100 Most Powerful Arabs Under 40

15. Afrah Nasser
Journalist and blogger
Sweden (Yemen)
Media
Age: 30
@Afrahnasser

The 30-year-old journalist worked as a reporter for the Yemen Observer newspaper between 2008 and 2011 but has since become known for her influential blog that focuses on women’s rights, democracy and the politics of Yemen. The Yemen revolution in 2011 — “when youth, like me, took the streets and called for social justice and equal citizenship for all” — was what prompted her to start writing the blog, and it has since been described as one of the ten must-read blogs from the Middle East by CNN, and ranked number three among the top 35 Middle East blogs by Al Monitor. The BBC featured Nasser in its coverage of “100 women who changed the world”, and in 2014 she won the Swedish Publicist Club’s Dawit Isaak Prize in honour of the Eritrean journalism who campaigned for press freedom but has been jailed since 2001. As well as her blog, she has written columns and articles for media outlets including The National, Al Arabi magazine and Yemen’s Al Thawra newspaper, worked for Swedish International Radio 2012 and contributed to two books. Despite receiving death threats from supporters of the Yemeni regime, Stockholm-based Nasser refuses to stop writing about what is happening in her homeland, telling Arabian Business, “My weapon is only my words, and I use them to speak up for the voiceless.”