Dr. Haleh Arbab has over four decades of experience as a leader in education for development. She creates programs and systems that value participation, justice, and learning in action, and develops and applies educational materials that draw from both spiritual and scientific sources of practical knowledge.
Haleh joined FUNDAEC in 1982, where she participated in community development and capacity building projects. From 1995 to 2005 Haleh directed Centro Universitario de Bienestar Rural (The University Center for Rural Wellbeing), a Colombian university she co-founded in 1988 in a primarily Afro-Colombian region that offered undergraduate and graduate degree programs in education for development. Three thousand students have completed programs through Centro Universitario, some of whom studied online in collaboration with a network of colleagues Haleh trained in countries including Costa Rica, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Zambia, Macau, China, India, Qatar, Oman, Canada, the United States, Australia, and England. She has authored high school, university, and graduate level textbooks that train students in approaches to social and economic development based on collaboration, cooperation, and mutual assistance; taught at the university level; participated in producing radio programs for local development; and represented FUNDAEC in various national and international spaces.
Haleh served as the director of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity from 2005 to 2018, where she led efforts to elaborate and promote a Discourse on Science, Religion, and Development in collaboration with NGOs, government officials, and academics in India, Uganda, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Brazil. During this time, she also led an expanding team to design, implement, evaluate, and refine graduate and undergraduate seminars to develop critical thinking skills in students about social issues and orient their future professions to contribute to constructive social change.
She holds a masters in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania and a Doctorate in Education from the Center for International Education at the University of Massachusetts. She has lived for extended periods of time on three continents, and worked on six. She and her husband currently live between Colombia and the United States.