Shaikha Khaled Al Bahar was promoted to the Deputy Group CEO of the National Bank of Kuwait, one of the largest banks in the Middle East, in 2014. In 2024, her group across 13 countries—including the U.S., China, and France—brought in $1.6 billion and held $128.5 billion in assets. Al Bahar ran the bank's first global leadership program for women, NBK RISE, and helped train 20 women for executive roles. During her 30 years in the industry, Al Bahar has overseen almost 10,000 people.

Mona Yousuf Almoayyed is the managing director of a family business that started as a humble roadside shop—selling tea, sugar and coffee—and today is a veritable conglomerate with business units devoted to cars, electronics, heavy equipment and industrial building operations. She first joined the business in 1974 and assumed her current position in 2000. Almoayyed also holds several board seats: she is the chair and founding member of the Migrant Workers Protection Society, chair of Ebdaa for Microfinance-Bahrain, and chair of the executive committee of the Arab International Women’s Forum.

Longtime civil servant Ladidi Kuluwa Bako-Aiyegbusi is the director-head of the Nutrition Department at Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare—a critical position in a country where acute malnutrition affects two million children and accounts for nearly half of all deaths of children under the age of five. Bako-Aiyegbusi’s solution to the malnutrition crisis is simple yet innovative: a bouillon cube fortified with iron, zinc, folic acid and vitamin B12. “If we’re successful, that would mean that the fortified bouillon seasoning cubes in so many Nigerian dishes would also contribute to improving the micronutrient content of the dishes in my country,” Bako-Aiyegbusi wrote in a Gates Foundation report in 2024.

Aida Batlle is a fifth-generation coffee producer who grows, processes and exports coffee from her family’s farms in El Salvador. In 2002, she assumed leadership of the family business and built a reputation for high-end, traceable coffee sold to international roasters including Intelligentsia and Blue Bottle. As price volatility, tariffs and supply-chain disruption reshaped the industry during the pandemic era, Batlle broadened her business. Since the early 2020s, she has taken a more hands-on role developing her family’s commercial and residential real estate holdings, creating a second business anchored in the same land as her farms. The diversification stabilized operations while sustaining agricultural production amid increasingly unpredictable global markets.

As much of the world races to upgrade its environmental infrastructure, Estelle Brachlianoff commands one of the few businesses capable of delivering sustainable solutions on a global scale. Through its three core businesses (water, waste, energy), the $48 billion company provides drinking water to 111 million people, treats 65 million tons of waste, and produces 42 million MWh of energy, giving Brachlianoff control over one of the largest platforms for sustainable infrastructure in the world. Brachlianoff became Veolia CEO in 2022, just before turning 50, after rising through the ranks of the Paris-based utility giant since joining in 2005 as a special advisor in its waste solutions division.

The first (and so far only) Spanish-born actress to win an Oscar award for acting, Penélope Cruz is one of Hollywood’s most enduring talents. She made her TV debut at just 16 and had her first movie a year after that. Today, she is known for her roles in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (the film that notched Cruz her Academy Award in 2009), Ferrari and Volver. In March, she’ll appear in The Bride!, a Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed horror film that’s a reimagining of the Bride of Frankenstein. Cruz has said that she’s been asked about aging ever since she was in her twenties, but turning 50 was “a huge, beautiful thing… it means I’m here and I’m healthy.”

A computer scientist by training, Eileen Burbidge calls herself an “accidental VC.” Burbidge started her career at Verizon Wireless, Apple and Sun Microsystems, but it was a 2004 gig as an early employee at Skype that set her on a path towards venture capital. In 2007, Burbidge joined her Skype friends at Ambient Sound Investments, an Estonia-based venture capital firm; by 2011, she struck out on her own and cofounded Passion Capital. One of her most noteworthy investments so far has been a $2.5 million pre-seed investment in neobank Monzo, now valued at $5.9 billion.

A beloved singer, songwriter and humanitarian from South Africa, Yvonne Chaka Chaka celebrated her 60th birthday in 2025 by releasing remixes of her top hits and serving as one of the headliners for December’s African Festival Concert in Accra. Chaka first started singing in the 1980s and by 1990 had earned the nickname “Princess of Africa” following a successful tour through Uganda. Around this same time, Nelson Mandela named Chaka as the first ambassador for his children’s fund. Over her four-decade career Chaka has released more than a dozen albums and has turned her “princess of Africa” moniker into both a nonprofit foundation and for-profit beauty company.

Neveen El Tahri is one of the most influential women in business in Egypt. She started her career in 1980 as a teller for Chase Manhattan Bank’s Egyptian branch, and in 1994 became an entrepreneur when she cofounded a brokerage business with her brother-in-law. She went on to found a number of asset management and consulting businesses, and was the first woman to sit on the board of the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Today, she chairs Delta Shield Management, a financial consulting firm based in Giza, and 138 Pyramids, an early-stage VC business she established after the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. In 2021, El Tahri was appointed to a five-year term in the Egyptian Parliament.

Hilda Heine was 64 when she first became president of the Marshall Islands in 2016, drawing on a long career as an educator, college administrator and former government minister. As the first woman to lead the Pacific island nation, Heine made climate change the defining issue of her presidency, using international forums including the United Nations General Assembly and global climate negotiations to press major economies to recognize sea-level rise as an immediate threat to the Marshall Islands’ sovereignty. She lost her reelection bid in 2020 but was victorious in her nation’s 2024 election, and since reassuming the role of president she is again sounding the alarm about the devastating effects of climate change to the Marshall Islands population.”We will be submerged by 2050 if the world doesn’t do its part,” Heine said in September.

When Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum opened its doors to the public last November, it was the culmination of dreams decades in the making. In 2003, Róisín Heneghan and her small Dublin-based architecture firm beat out 1,500 other architects to win the contract for the world’s largest collection of Egyptian antiquities. The GEM spans more than 5 million square feet and is home to 100,000 artifacts, but Heneghan says that Giza’s famous pyramids, which sit just beyond the museum’s campus, factored into the museum’s final shape. “We designed the permanent galleries so that the pyramids can be seen when you’re in the galleries—so that in a way the pyramids become the largest piece in the collection,” Heneghan said recently.

Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons in 1969, building one of fashion’s most influential independent houses. In 2004, at age 62, she launched Dover Street Market, a curated, designer-led retail concept that blends luxury shopping with exhibition-style presentation and has since expanded to cities including Tokyo, London, New York, Paris and Los Angeles. The platform has become a key launchpad for emerging designers alongside established brands. In 2017, Kawakubo was the subject of a rare solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, cementing her status as not just a fashion designer but a cultural icon.

Vanessa Hudson has navigated some turbulent skies at........

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