About the Asian University for Women

The Asian University for Women (AUW) is being established as a leading institution for higher education for women from across Asia. The campus will be located in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and has been designed by the renowned architect Moshe Safdie with land donated by the Government of Bangladesh. The University will be a regional institution dedicated solely to women's education and leadership development. AUW will be international in outlook but rooted in the contexts and aspirations of people across Asia, offering a curriculum that combines liberal arts and the sciences with graduate professional training. The principal institutional financial supporters of the project to date include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Citigroup Foundation, and USAID.

The mission of the Asian University for Women is based on the firm belief that education - especially higher education - provides a critical pathway to leadership development, economic progress, and social and political equity. AUW will educate promising young women from diverse cultural, religious, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds from across South and South East Asia and the Middle East - with a particular emphasis on the inclusion of women from poor, rural, and refugee populations. AUW will enable its students to become skilled and innovative professionals, service-oriented leaders and promoters of tolerance and understanding. With an initial student body of 200, and growing towards and enrollment of 2700, the target student/faculty ratio is 13:1. The Access Academy, a year-long pre-collegiate bridge program, opened in Spring 2008. It currently houses 130 students who will matriculate to AUW in September 2009.

Speaker Bio

Kamal Ahmad serves as the President and CEO of the Asian University for Women Support Foundation. Educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and the University of Michigan Law School, Mr. Ahmad has combined a career in private transactional law practice and international development. He focused on corporate mergers and acquisitions as well as U.S. federal securities laws while at the New York offices of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson (1996-2000) and the London office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw (2001-2002). He has also worked with the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and UNICEF.

In 1998 he helped launch the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education and Society and co-directed it with Professor David Bloom of Harvard University. As a freshman at Harvard College, he founded and directed the Overseas Development Network - a consortium of campus organizations devoted to international development. As a teenager growing up in Bangladesh, he founded a series of primary schools for working children in Dhaka.

Mr. Ahmad was named as "one of the 20 outstanding undergraduates of the nation" by Time magazine in 1987. The Paul G. Hoffman Awards Fund, created to honor the first Administrator of the United Nations Development Program, gave him a UN Gold Peace Medal and Citation Scroll for his "outstanding contribution to national and international development." In 2002, the World Economic Forum based in Davos, Switzerland elected him as a "Global Leader for Tomorrow."