ORLANDO - An Iraqi professor is spending a year studying in Florida, hoping to use what she learns to help women back home succeed professionally and create their own businesses.
Amel Abed Mohammed Ali is participating in a new program started by Orlando-based Tupperware Brands Corp., the U.S. Secretary of State's Office and Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. The program is designed to teach female educators from other countries business skills they can take home to others.
"It's about women's issues, and we need that in Iraq," said Ali, 55, who heads Babylon University's Department of Industrial Management.
Historically, Iraqi women had more rights than in many other Middle Eastern countries. They had laws specifically ensuring that they could attend school, run for office and own property. But their quality of life has deteriorated in recent years from the effects of sanctions and war, newer restrictions on their rights, and violence.
Some women do own businesses despite those challenges, but many have been heavily dependent on contracts with the U.S. government developed during the Iraq War. Now, with American troops withdrawn, they must begin finding new markets for their work.
Private-sector development has been hindered throughout the years of strife. Factories were destroyed during the war, and both wars and sanctions have taken their toll on Iraq's infrastructure, once considered the best in the Middle East.
"A strong economy needs a good infrastructure," Ali said. "Iraq is unstable."
But the nation is making progress, she said. Students who had few opportunities to learn from the outside world during Saddam Hussein's rule, for example, can now get Internet access, which had previously been restricted.
Ali hopes to bring even more of that outside knowledge back home, using what she learns here to start a career-development center.
She is taking a specially designed curriculum at Rollins that focuses on entrepreneurship, women's business ownership and financial self-sufficiency.
She also will get some work experience at Tupperware, learning the basics of direct selling, sales-force development and market analysis.
Though Tupperware sells its products in many countries, it says the time is still not right to enter Iraq. But CEO Rick Goings visited the country a year ago as part of a task force learning about women's struggles there.
Tupperware often gets involved with issues affecting women because so much of its global sales force is female.
The company hopes to continue sponsoring female academics from around the globe after Ali goes home.
"We feel like they can have the greatest influence when they go back," Tupperware spokeswoman Elinor Steele said. "They can touch more people through the educational system there than we can."
Ali "will have hundreds of students she will be able to touch and have an influence on," Steele said.
