Pantene’s Shine Programme and MBC4’s iMatter have teamed up for interactive learning campaign targeted at women.

The collaboration aims to empower Saudi Arabia’s young women to face life head-on, achieve their goals and fulfil their ambitions by giving them the catalysts they need to shine, the company said in a statement.

The Pantene Shine programme has been driven by the growing movement for women’s empowerment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and is scheduled to be launched throughout the region later in the year, it added.

At the opening of the forum-day forum, attended by hundreds of Effat College students, it was announced that in addition to the inauguration of the Pantene Shine-iMatter partnership, MBC4’s iMatter has launched an online competition, the ‘iMatter Women’s Achievement Awards,’ whereby women can express their creativity in a number of different categories and win prizes, the company said.

Special guest speaker Laurel Papworth, an expert on social networking from the University of Sydney, Australia, delivered a lecture entitled New Media Literacy, which showed the aspiring young women how social networking can be utilised to educate and learn from other like-minded women. 

The students were then divided into small workshop groups of 20, where they had the opportunity to learn from and interact with thought leaders and tenured business professionals on a number of significant topics including Web 2.0 and online knowledge sharing.

“The Pantene Shine and iMatter partnership is a fantastic opportunity to prepare young Arab women for the future,” said Samiramees Al Hashimi, MBC4. “Like Pantene Shine, MBC4 iMatter is firmly committed to proactively demonstrating to young women that it’s their time to shine. We are proud to help to be catalysts of a trend which we hope will pave the way for women all over the region to realise their dreams in ways they never thought possible”.

“This partnership reiterates MBC4’s commitment to the Middle East, in getting our future generations of young Arab women to be more involved on a larger scale and to aspire to do great things,” she said.

“Today’s Arab women have many different roles to play, and what we really want to communicate through the Shine Programme and by providing the right kind of impetus, is that a woman can shine from the inside and achieve phenomenal things for herself, her family and her community, whether she is a mother, a CEO, or a businesswoman,” said Ghaida Al Shamy of Pantene’s Shine Programme.

“The partnership will provide Saudi Arabia’s ambitious young women with the tools and knowledge - through interactive learning and shared acumen from a range of different personalities and professors across a wide range of disciplines and industries - that can’t be learned in the classroom, and that will enable the young women to go out and make a difference in the world around them,” she said.

“This partnership comes at an important time when women’s progression is a topic of increasing significance throughout the countries of the region. This will be achieved when women are given opportunities and allowed similar access to future job and career prospects in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” said the Dean of Effat College. – TradeArabia News Service