Saneeya Hussain

Saneeya Hussain was a journalist, environmentalist, and editor from Pakistan. She was one of the first Pakistani journalists to participate in people-to-people contact with Indian environmentalists. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, on August 13, 1954. She had 11 siblings, including Javed Jabbar, a prominent media personality and former minister. She started her career as a copywriter at MNJ Pakistan in 1978. In the mid-1980s, she edited The Star Weekend magazine, which was a platform for dissenting views and women's rights. She was also a member of the Shirkat Gah Collective and the Women's Action Forum, which resisted the dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. She left The Star in 1988 and joined the World Conservation Union (IUCN), where she worked on the Pakistan National Conservation Strategy. She also founded the Journalists Resource Centre, which trained and encouraged journalists in environmental reporting. She visited the US in 1964 to study the programs for the blind, as she was suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually caused her blindness. She was also a founding member of the International Federation of the Blind and the Disabled People's Federation of Pakistan. She received several awards and honors for her work, such as the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Berlin Prize. She married a Brazilian man in 1998 and moved to Brazil, where she died of natural causes on April 20, 2005. She was 50 years old.