The CBA’s President and General Manager of International Relations at Hum TV, Moneeza Hashmi, has been appointed to the Mohtrama Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Chair for Peace, Reconciliation and Development at Pakistan’s Lahore College for Women University (LCWU).

This is the inaugural appointment for the new position at the largest university for women in Asia. In the role Mrs Hashmi (pictured) will be tasked with strengthening and facilitating the university’s links with national and international organisations. She will also work closely with the institution’s mass communications department to develop curriculum and research opportunities. LCWU was established in 1922 and has 10,000 students at intermediate, bachelor’s, master’s and PhD levels.

Professor Sabiha Mansoor, Vice-Chancellor of LCWU, said she was pleased and honoured to have Mrs Hashmi in the new role: “Moneeza brings with her years of dedicated services for development of women and is a strong advocate of rights of the marginalised segments of society to enable them to access education and employment.”

Dr Mansoor added that Mrs Hashmi’s expertise made her “an ideal chair to galvanise the energy around her in the Women Institute of Leadership and Learning through strategic planning, to promote peace and development that will have far-reaching impact at national and international levels.”

Moneeza Hashmi will be utilising her four decades of experience in electronic media and contributions to the field of development and gender. She has served on committees in several countries working on promoting positive images of women in the media.

The chair is named in honour of Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and 1993 to 1996. She was assassinated in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan’s Punjab in 2007. She was the first woman to lead an Islamic nation.