Hanna Yamir, MS Alumna

When Hanna Yamir chose to design a peacebuilding intervention on the Ethiopian inter-ethnic conflict for a Spring 2015 class with Dennis Sandole, she never expected those same ethnic tensions to flare up again. “Using the private sector as a major actor in the peacebuilding process, my colleague and I produced an exhaustive two-part paper filled with politico-historical analysis underlining how complex and, most importantly, how combustible ethnic-federalism was in that part of the world.” Fast-forward to 2016 and Ethiopia is witnessing an unprecedented level of ethnic mobilizing from the two largest ethnic groups against the Ethiopian government, a prediction Hanna made in her paper.

Hanna came to S-CAR exactly for this reason. “As a naive, and sometimes idealist University of Virginia international relations undergraduate major, I was convinced that global problems like ethnic division, inequality, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, global warming didn’t just happen in a vacuum but rather something had to trigger them,” she said. For Hanna, issues such as unaddressed historical ills, greed, politicization of religion and ethnic identities, and intractable conflicts were some of the sources of so much suffering and global instability. “At S-CAR I felt at home and it was heartwarming to find a community of likeminded people coming from all walks of life, seeking ways to address the 'global problematique' as Professor Dennis Sandole called it.”
 
While Hanna was pursuing her graduate degree, she worked for a non-profit that trained refugees, immigrant, and low-income women in the DC area on entrepreneurship and workforce development. Currently Hanna works for Friends of Angola, an advocacy organization that seeks to strengthen the capacity of civil society and Angolan youth by using the power of social media to promote nonviolent civic engagement. In addition to this, she is also the co-founder of the United Transition Network (UTN), a nonprofit that works with immigrants in the Washington Metropolitan Area to help them integrate and to live informed lives. "The ultimate goal of UTN is to close the gap between immigrants and existing as well as available resources," she said.

According to Hanna, "My experiences from all of these organizations, as well as the years I spent at S-CAR, became a sort of catalyst for my desire to use entrepreneurship as a tool to empower women and youth as a way to bring social change and mint a new generation of leaders but also transcend those stubborn racial, ethnic, and social divisions perpetuated by callous demagogues." Thus, for Hanna, entrepreneurship is the key to mend bridges and lead towards pattern-breaking social change in Africa, Asia, and in the U.S.