Habiba Al Marashi

Chairperson of the Emirates Environmental Group, U.A.E.

Habiba Al Marashi is the co-founder and Chairperson of Emirates Environmental Group (EEG), a pioneering non-government organization based in Dubai. A U.A.E. national, Habiba began her professional career in government service and was nominated to the Dubai Government Excellence Awards in 2000.

She founded EEG in 1991 with 12 like-minded people while she was still holding a seat in the government office. Under Mrs. Al Marashi's leadership, EEG bloomed from a small voluntary organization to a large network both locally and globally. She has been instrumental in drawing up EEG's framework of operations and management systems. EEG became the world's first environmental NGO to be accredited with the ISO 14001 certification and is the only civil society organization in the region accredited by UNEP and UNCCD.

Personally and at the organizational level, Mrs. Al Marashi has won several awards for contributing to environment, community and gender development issues and she was also the first recipient of the Emirates Businesswomen Award in the Professional Category. Recently she has been appointed to the board of UN Global Compact (UN GC), considered to be the world's largest voluntary corporate citizenship initiative. Mrs. Al Marashi is also a member of the Women Leaders Intercultural Forum (WLIF), and one of the Founding Members at the Emirates Green Building Council (EGBC), which aims at advancing green building principles for protecting the environment and ensuring sustainability in the United Arab Emirates.