MUMBAI, INDIA | WASHINGTON DC, USA – Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international non-profit that empowers and champions women leaders around the world, partnered with artist Gayle Kabaker to create a ground-breaking art exhibit: Vital Voices: 100 Women Using their Power to Empower.
Akanksha Hazari, CEO & Founder of m.Paani, is the only Indian tech entrepreneur to be chosen and featured in this unprecedented art exhibition and companion coffee table book, celebrating 100 global women leaders who are redefining power. Akanksha will be featured in the series alongside the likes of Melinda Gates, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Beyoncé, Serena Williams and many other inspiring women.
Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower – in conversation with Alyse Nelson featuring paintings by Gayle Kabaker – will feature a selection of original portraits, accompanied by thought- provoking excerpts of the first-person narratives included in the book. Candid and compelling, each leader shares personal stories, insights and ideas, showing us that women lead differently and that this difference is sorely needed in our world today. While each woman is path breaking in her own right, it’s together that these 100 voices illustrate the transformative power of women’s leadership across cultures, industries, and generations.
Akanksha Hazari shares, “I feel incredibly humbled to be a part of such an amazing group of women, who inspire me and teach me. Women stand on the front line of critical change the world needs today. They make me bullish about the future.”
m.Paani is leading the revolution to empower India’s 60 million+ local retailers by digitizing & organising them to deliver the neighbourhood shopping experience of the future.
Akanksha adds: “Local Retailers are the foundation of a thriving community and India’s economy. Small businesses account for almost 40% of the country’s employment. m.Paani is enabling local shops to go online, digitise their consumer relationships, access business data and insights, and manage their business operations more effectively. We empower local retailers to thrive in a rapidly changing world.”
At 21, Akanksha Hazari was a founding partner of Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, the world’s first policy think tank for young people; today YPFP serves young people in 9 countries and boasts a global membership. She also led 5 major economic initiatives in Gaza and the West Bank, including a
$200m loan guarantee facility to support
Palestinian owned SMEs and led a pan-India agritech project where she spent a
year living in villages across India looking at how mobile technology can be
used to increase farmer income. Akanksha is a Princeton University and
Cambridge University alumnus, Ashoka
Fellow, and former competitive squash player ranked in the top 20 juniors internationally and is a 2-time HK & Indian national champion, among winning multiple other international titles. She speaks 6 languages. Akanksha won the $1m Hult Prize 2011 awarded by President Bill Clinton, and received the Vital Voices Global Economic Empowerment Award 2016 from Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeline Albright, and is recognised in US Senate Resolution 418.
Other notable women included in the select 100 leaders featured in the exhibit and companion book are, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court Justice, Rihanna, and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, amongst others.
Vital Voices has worked with over 18,000 women leaders across 182 countries and territories for the past 20 years. From that experience, the organization understands that women lead differently; the thousands of women leaders Vital Voices has partnered with have been resolute in their sense of purpose and commitment towards making positive change.
“2020 marks a significant year for women, with the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States and the 25th anniversary of the historic United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. It is a critical year for taking stock of all that’s been achieved in the global movement for gender equality,” said Alyse Nelson, President, and CEO of Vital Voices. “As we look to the future, and the great unfinished business that remains, we turn to 100 of the most daring and creative leaders of our time, who share their vision and solutions in Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower.”
Each painting in the series is being produced by Gayle Kabaker. Kabaker is an award-winning illustrator and writer living in Western Massachusetts whose work has been used for everything from fashion and general illustration, to animation, web design, logo and brand development. She had her first New Yorker magazine cover ‘June Brides’ celebrating gay marriage in 2012, and has had a total of five covers since then. Her work tends to be very feminine, exploring beauty in all forms.
“Painting such a wide range of women of all ages, from all over the world and ‘getting to know’ each of these amazing, strong, brave women by reading about them and studying their faces carefully from photos in order to catch their likeness in a painting, has felt like such a privilege,” said Kabaker about the
exhibit. “It’s been quite an education. Sometimes uplifting and exciting, other times, really painful to realize the tragedies in these women lives that led them to become activists. I am so lucky to have an amazing creative collaborator in Vital Voices President, CEO and co-founder Alyse Nelson, who gave me lots of creative freedom to let each painting dictate what felt right. This has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on.”
The exhibit will debut on International Women’s Day (March 8, 2020) and will be on display in the Hall of Nations at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through March 21, 2020, as a part of DIRECT CURRENT, the Center’s two-week contemporary culture immersion.
