From the Middle of Texas to the Middle East, a Diplomat Champions Human Rights
Maryum Saifee MIA ’07 was going to be a doctor.
That was the plan, at least according to her parents, who had emigrated from India to the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, where they raised Saifee and her brother.
But Saifee had other plans.
Saifee was insatiably curious about the world— and much more interested in exploring it than in applying to medical school. She enrolled in college at the age of 15, balancing premed courses with art history classes and extensive travel. She spent a semester abroad in Florence as well as a summer in Paris studying painting.
That introduction to a life spent living, learning, and working abroad ignited a passion in Saifee and kicked off what is now a career of more than a decade in US Foreign Service focused mainly on human rights and women’s issues. She has spent years in Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan working with the US Department of State, and has held appointments at the Human Rights Foundation and the Truman Center for National Policy, among others.
In January 2023 Saifee joined the State Department’s newly launched Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP), where she is a senior adviser helping to modernize the department, educate diplomats on technology, address issues of cybersecurity, and ensure emerging technologies preserve human rights.
“I didn’t see myself in government,” Saifee says with a laugh. “I’m not a boxy bureaucrat, I’m a creative. But the beauty of the Foreign Service, for me, is you can reinvent yourself every couple of years. In the future the problems that we’re dealing with are going to be more and more multidimensional and difficult, requiring a more holistic approach — one that includes all these different perspectives.”
“In the future the problems that we’re dealing with are going to be more and more multidimensional and difficult, requiring a more holistic approach— one that includes all these different perspectives.”
After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, Saifee figured she would apply to medical school sooner or later, but being only 19, she decided to take time off first to travel. Before long, she had joined the Peace Corps, based in Jordan. It was there that she first learned about the human rights and labor issues affecting domestic workers in the region, an experience that would become pivotal in terms of her career aspirations and was the reason she applied to SIPA: to learn more. Once at SIPA Saifee reveled in the breadth of courses offered, studying labor migration and sustainable development, among other topics.
“These kinds of courses rewired how I think about the world,” Saifee says, “and it really opened my eyes to history that just isn’t as known.”
She took the Foreign Service officer test thinking that the State Department could offer her one route to living and working overseas.
“I ended up in Cairo,” she says of her first State Department assignment in the summer of 2009, just a year or so before the Arab Spring. Soon Saifee found herself designing programs to engage youth on transitional justice and political participation immediately following the ousting of Egypt’s longtime president Hosni Mubarak.
Saifee fell in love with her very hands-on, challenging, fulfilling work. Her next assignment brought her to Iraq.
“I was processing visas of Iraqis who had worked for the US government in some way, either as translators or civil engineers, and because of their affiliations to the United States, they had been targeted and their lives had been threatened. It was very harrowing,” she says, recalling one case where the face of the individual she was interviewing was visibly disfigured by a gunshot wound. “For me, it was a wake-up call that we need to put the humanity part first, and whatever the circumstances, we need to do our jobs very well, no matter what.”
Back in Washington, DC, Saifee has dedicated herself to shining a light on important social issues and working on solutions for the betterment of society. One of the issues close to her heart is that of female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM or FGC).
As an undergraduate she had taken an anthropology seminar in which FGM was discussed, and it immediately stirred up a long-suppressed personal memory of her own. When she was seven years old, Saifee and her brother were sent to stay with relatives in India. Her aunt, a medical doctor, had performed the ritual on Saifee during that trip without her parents’ consent.
When Saifee suddenly recalled this experience as a young woman, she knew she had to use her voice to raise awareness of the practice and do what she could to advocate for girls’ and women’s rights. In 2016 she had her chance. As a senior policy adviser in the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, she published her personal story in The Guardian and amplified the voices of other survivors to help lead the US government’s response to and policy on the practice. She created embassy tool kits and secured $1 million in funding to help diplomats combat FGM in the United States and abroad.
At CDP, Saifee oversees a new fellowship for technology and tech policy courses that embeds 15 diplomats, State Department officials, and civic and Foreign Service workers in schools across the US, including SIPA. “If our diplomats are smart on technology, this could be our superpower as the State Department,” she says.
“My North Star throughout has been, How do you have a positive impact, even if the situations are suboptimal? That’s what’s kept me in the job as long as I have been.”
Maryum Saifee participated in this interview in her personal capacity, and her views do not necessarily represent those of the US Department of State or any other institutional affiliation.