The ChangeMakers — Emirati Women’s Day 2026 | “Women Who Inspire” Issue

Council for International Relations & Diplomacy : Featuring Sarah Al Amiri and Manal Ataya

On a February night in 2021, a room full of engineers in Dubai sat frozen in front of their screens, watching numbers scroll past that would decide, in a matter of minutes, whether years of work had succeeded or burned up in the thin Martian atmosphere. At the centre of that room was a young scientist named Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, watching a spacecraft she had helped build attempt something no Arab nation had ever done.

The Hope Probe made it. And when it did, the world’s cameras found Al Amiri first.

Nearly a thousand kilometres away, in the emirate of Sharjah, another woman had already spent fifteen years building something quieter but no less ambitious — not a spacecraft bound for another world, but a network of museums bound to preserve this one. Her name was Manal Ataya, and by the time Hope reached Mars, she had already opened six new museums and reshaped how an entire country understood its own history.

This magazine put Sara Al Amiri and Manal Ataya on its cover in 2021 under the words Women Who Inspire. It felt, at the time, like the end of a story. Five years later, as the UAE marks Emirati Women’s Day 2026 under the theme “We Emerge Stronger and Better,” it is clear that neither woman’s story ended where we left it — and that together, their two very different paths trace the same shape: the quiet, deliberate work of building a nation’s future, one institution at a time.

The Girl Who Wasn’t Sure

Long before Mission Control, Al Amiri was a schoolgirl in Abu Dhabi who had fallen in love with a photograph of the Andromeda galaxy at the age of twelve. But when it came time to choose a degree, she didn’t pursue astronomy. The UAE had no space programme then — a career among the stars seemed simply not “a realistic option” for someone in her position. So she studied computer engineering instead.

Then, in 2009, an opportunity appeared that hadn’t existed a year before: a software engineering role on the country’s first Earth observation satellite. She had no way of knowing it was the first step of a staircase that would eventually reach another planet. By 2014, still in her twenties, she had been named science lead and deputy project manager of the most ambitious undertaking the UAE had ever attempted — a mission to put a probe in orbit around Mars, timed to arrive in 2021, the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s founding. There was no roadmap. She assembled a team that would eventually be described as roughly eighty percent women, and seven years later, Hope reached Mars.

The Woman Who Built the Rooms Where History Lives

Manal Ataya’s ascent followed a different orbit entirely. Born in Dubai in 1979, she studied at Hamilton College before pursuing graduate work in museum studies at Harvard — training she brought home in 2006 to help found the Sharjah Museums Authority, first as its founding deputy director, then, from 2008, as its Director General.

Where Sara Al Amiri had to build a space programme from nothing, Ataya had to build something arguably harder to make visible: public appetite for culture, memory, and heritage in a region rapidly modernising around her. Under her direction, the Authority grew to encompass sixteen institutions — museums of Islamic art, archaeology, maritime history, and science — and she personally oversaw the opening of six new museums and four major refurbishments. She spoke often, at conferences from Sharjah to Mauritius, about culture as a form of diplomacy: sharing a nation’s story, she argued, “widens human understanding and cultural dialogue,” building the kind of social cohesion no single achievement can manufacture on its own. In 2018 the French government recognised her work bridging archaeological and cultural cooperation between France and the UAE with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres — one of France’s highest honours for contributions to the arts.

Two Missions, One Pattern

Here is where most magazine profiles end — at the medal, the milestone, the headline. Neither woman’s story did.

Sara Al Amiri kept building. As Chair of the UAE Space Agency, she now oversees plans for a Venus flyby and an asteroid-belt mission — projects she has openly admitted will be harder than the one that made her famous, precisely because fame does not shortcut physics. And in July 2024, she took on something larger still: she was appointed UAE Minister of Education, tasked with shaping what an entire generation of Emirati children will be told is possible.

Manal Ataya, for her part, moved from building museums to safeguarding their future: in 2023 she was appointed an advisor to the Sharjah Museums Authority by the Ruler of Sharjah himself — a role that trades daily operations for the kind of strategic, institution-shaping counsel that only someone who built the place from its foundation can offer.

Neither woman stopped at the achievement that made her famous. Both used it as a foundation for the next one.

What “Stronger and Better” Actually Looks Like

This year’s Emirati Women’s Day theme arrives alongside a striking change: for the first time, the observance is being extended from a single day into a month-long national programme. It is as if the country itself has recognised what these two careers, side by side, quietly demonstrate — that emergence is not a single moment you arrive at and then leave behind. It is a process chosen again and again: mission after mission, museum after museum, appointment after appointment.

Sarah Al Amiri did not stop at Mars. Manal Ataya did not stop at sixteen museums. Between them, a spacecraft engineer and a museum-builder have spent two decades proving the same thing in two different languages: that a nation’s future is built not by a single generation’s achievement, but by what that achievement is used to build next.

That, perhaps, is the truest measure of women who inspire — not the moment they are celebrated, but everything they build afterward.

The ChangeMakers Magazine — Marking Emirati Women’s Day, August 28, 2026.