On November 24, 2021, Global Voices, through its Rising Voices initiative, will host an online conversation during this year’s Bread&Net unconference, featuring digital activists from MENA working to keep their mother languages alive in a challenging digital landscape.

The panel “Exploring the intersection of digital rights & low-resourced and minority languages in MENA” will raise questions about the challenges for minority, indigenous, and low-resourced MENA language communities for creating or accessing digital content in their mother languages.

We’ll hear the experiences from three MENA minority language digital activists working with the Amazigh, Kurdish and Nubian languages who are taking a “Do-It-Yourself” approach to ensuring that their languages are present on the internet by creating digital content, helping to build tools, as well as training and mentoring other speakers of their language to participate online.

The participating activists are:

• Anass Sedrati is a founding member of the Moroccan Wikimedia User Group, and is active in creating and editing articles on Wikipedia in different languages, including the Amazigh language. He was a member of the global team that wrote the Wikimedia 2030 strategy, and is currently a member of the Wikimedia Movement Charter Committee, which serves as a committee to write a global constitution for all Wikipedia actors around the world.
• Aso Wahab is an activist, blogger and trainer in the field of digital rights and digital safety, member of the Iraqi Network for Social Media (INSM), and founder of Cyber Kurds platform.
• Doaa Farid is an Egyptian Nubian journalist and founder of The Nubian Voices initiative, concerned with raising awareness about the Nubian culture and language in digital media. Through this initiative, Doaa cooperates with all Nubian civil society organizations and institutions to publish stories and blogs on the Internet about their activism.

The session will be moderated by Mariam Abuadas, an anthropologist and project director in the fields of community management and gender equality throughout the Middle East, in the field and within digital spaces. Mariam is an Arabic Translation Manager at Global Voices, she is also the founder of both Tatawor, a community NGO in Jordan and Akhbarek, a women centric media platform that focuses on the intersection between language, freedom of expression and digital rights of Arab women.

Register to attend the online event here. Please note that the session will take place in Arabic.