Rola Dashti

Rola A. Al-Dashti (born 1964) is a Kuwaiti government minister. She is one of the first female MPs elected in the Kuwaiti parliament. She is the minister of state planning and development affairs. Dashti lobbied for the May 2005 decree permitting Kuwaiti women to run for parliamentary elections for the first time. She was the first woman to file her papers at the election department, when the registration opened, and she herself was a candidate in the 2006 parliamentary election. In the 2009 parliamentary elections, she and three other women won seats to become the first women to enter the Kuwaiti parliament.

Education

Rola Al-Dashti holds a Ph.D. in Population Economics from Johns Hopkins University. She has lectured, conducted and managed research in development and applied economics particularly in regard to the country's recent quest for modernizing its economic, financial, and social processes.

Career

She has held positions in the R&D institution Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (Manager, Economics Department), worked as Senior Economist at the National Bank of Kuwait and provided consultancy to the World Bank. She also managed all the contracts signed on behalf of the government of Kuwait for the Emergency and Reconstruction Program during the invasion-to-post liberation period (1990/1991).