Profile: Salma Khan, ’92, Bangladesh
September 2006
When Salma Khan arrived in the United States for her Eisenhower Fellowship in 1992, she had a simple goal: to learn how U.S. organizations and leaders improved the legal, economic, and political status of women. She had no idea just how much her fellowship would influence the rest of her career.
Khan did not see herself as a leader when she first began her career as a teacher in the Department of Economics at the University of Chittagong. But she recognized an instinctive sense of equality and a curious, vocal nature within herself that soon led to an opportunity to serve as the first female policymaker on the Government of Bangladesh’s Planning Commission. “I wanted to prove that women were agents of economic development,” she says. “I wanted my voice to matter.”
It was during her time with the Planning Commission that Khan was awarded her Eisenhower Fellowship, an experience that included traveling to 25 cities in 19 states for 62 appointments during her 11-week stay. She met with individuals ranging from top-level experts and academicians to grassroots leaders and social workers, all of whom were knowledgeable about women’s advocacy in all levels of government and society.
“The program offered me wide opportunities to develop an understanding of the multidimensional aspect of the [women’s development] issue,” she says. “It helped me years later to identify and formulate possible strategies to address those at various levels of my professional responsibilities.”
Khan cannot pinpoint a single event during her fellowship that affected her work or life. Rather, she says, it was the experience as a whole that truly made the impact. She credits her time as a Fellow with adding to her self-confidence, broadening her perspective of women’s issues, and drawing out her innate feminist consciousness.
“As I matured,” she explains, “I discovered the connectedness of issues on ground realities, even though with time, many things looked different in appearance, not much in substance. I learned to adopt a holistic, longer-term view to address the challenges I faced.”
Beyond to adding to her sense of self, Khan also discovered new perspectives for looking at women’s issues. Before her fellowship, she says she “only addressed women’s issues from the lens of economic development – better jobs and better wages. I never thought about women’s political rights.” She was introduced to new factors affecting women on a more global scale, such as the environment, domestic violence, political participation, and even the unique set of issues facing minority women.
Khan recalls that learning of these new issues from the women leaders she met during her fellowship shed new light on her beliefs. “Before, I was thinking about these issues on a subdued level,” she says. “Now, I could think about these issues out loud, and [I felt that] I was not alone. I learned how much women are discriminated against even in developed countries. I thought it was only in South Asia that things were bad.”
Since her time as a Fellow in the U.S., Khan has experienced many new opportunities for leadership and activism. Within a year of her fellowship, she was elected as an expert in the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the monitoring body of the “world’s most comprehensive legally binding treaty on women’s human rights.” This appointment to the UN was directly tied to her Eisenhower experience, she says. She learned of the convention and its nomination procedures during one of her EF appointments.
Now, as Bangladesh’s ambassador to Indonesia and a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, she is giving back to Eisenhower by helping re-launch a top-level Eisenhower Fellowships nominating committee in Bangladesh, with the first new Fellows expected to come to the U.S. in 2007.
Khan has found the widespread EF network beneficial as well, having utilized it on several occasions for various purposes. “While attending a UN conference in Rio, Brazil, I was stranded as my hotel booking was cancelled,” she recalls. “I contacted a Fellow who helped me out. When I was in Kolkata, India, I contacted a Fellow to provide me with some information on local [non-government organizations] working on HIV/AIDS… And just last month I called on Mr. Agung Laksono, a 1990 SNP Fellow who is now Speaker of the House of Representatives in Indonesia. He offered full support to me in carrying out my diplomatic responsibilities in Indonesia.”
In conclusion, Khan says her entire fellowship experience brought a plethora of learning and leadership opportunities – both personally and professionally. “Looking back, I feel that from the overall experience of being a Fellow, one can learn the value of shared understanding of the nature of challenges one might face in his or her endeavors,” she says. “One can get a sense of direction [resulting] from an honest and thorough review of one’s capabilities and potential as a future leader of the society.”