Original reporting · Founder interviews · The Annual Ranking
ARB Woman's Stories desk publishes original long-form journalism on the founders, ministers, fund managers and family-business successors reshaping the MENA economy. From a quarterly investigation into sovereign-wealth gender-lens mandates to a year-long series on first-generation female founders in Cairo and Riyadh, every piece is reported on the ground by our 19-person correspondent network — and is the work this region's editors cite when they need the truth.
Coverage beats
Every story in the archive belongs to one of our five standing desks. A returning reader knows where to land; a new reader gets an honest map of what we cover and what we don't.
Cover · Issue No. 47
This week's lead · Founders + Capital
For seven years she ran the strategy team at a Riyadh-listed conglomerate. Then she walked out, raised the largest first-check round by an Arab woman founder in 2024, and built a childcare and returns-to-work platform now operating in nine cities. In her first long-form interview, she explains the board fight, the LP who walked, and the math she refuses to share publicly.
Recent reporting
Original reporting from the last fortnight — a founder profile, a capital investigation, and a policy analysis that took eight months of FOIA-equivalent filing.
Founders · Cairo
She filed her first patent in 2018. In 2025 her vaccine is finally in Egyptian pharmacies. The story of what it took to get there — the licensing maze, the two co-founders who left, the night she almost quit — is a rare look at how female founders actually survive a regulated industry in this region.
Capital · Abu Dhabi & Riyadh
An eight-month investigation into the LPs behind the region's most-talked-about female-founder funds. We obtained the 2024 mandate revisions from two sovereign vehicles and one large family office. The pattern — and the names still missing from the list — challenges the way "gender-lens investing" is being marketed in the Gulf.
Methodology note: documents were reviewed against published allocation reports. Three institutional sources declined to comment on the record.
Policy · Amman
Most coverage summarized the bill in a single paragraph. We read all 184 pages, interviewed the minister who drafted it, and asked four employment lawyers where the loopholes are. The result is a section-by-section read of the law — including the childcare clause that quietly undoes the headline flexibility win.
The room changes when the reporting changes. We have spent nine years making sure that the women building this region's economy are described in full sentences — not in the bullet points someone else wrote about them.
Lina Al-Mansoori, Editor-in-Chief & Founder, ARB Woman
From her introduction to the 2025 edition of The 100 Most Powerful Arab Businesswomen
The Weekly Briefing
A single Friday email. One lead story, three reads we couldn't stop thinking about, and the closed-door moves we are tracking across MENA. Read by fund managers, founders and ministers in 31 countries — and now by 184,000 other women building things here.
