Leadership
Tara Uzra Dawood
Country President, PakistanMiss Tara Uzra Dawood is CEO and Founder of 786 Investments Ltd., one of Pakistan’s pioneer asset management companies. It is publicly listed on the Pakistani Stock Exchange. She also currently sits on the boards of Pakistan State Oil - where she chairs the Audit, HR and IT/Innovation committees - Pakistan Refinery Ltd., Dawood Family Takaful Ltd., and Mutual Funds Association of Pakistan, and previously served on the board of Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO).
She is further serving on the Energy Sub-Committee of Advisory Committee of the Planning Commission under Asad Umar, Federal Minister for Planning, Development, Reforms and Special Initiatives (PD&SL).
She is certified in Corporate Governance by both Pakistan Institute of Corporate Governance and Harvard Business School. She holds a Doctorate in Judicial Science from Harvard Law School - where she specialized in shariah law and finance, as well as mergers and acquisitions - and Bachelor of Arts Honors from Cornell University and Oxford University.
She worked for law firms in New York, Toronto, Amsterdam, Brussels and California before launching 786 Investments Ltd. She has served on the Faculty at Danube University Krems (Austria) as recommended by The International Investment Funds Association and EBAMA.
She speaks globally at numerous international mutual fund and banking conferences as an authority on shariah-compliant finance as well as finance for women, and most recently represented Pakistan at ALFI Rentree 2020, the annual Association of the Luxembourg Fund Industry, where she has previously been a speaker on Islamic finance in both 2013 and 2014.
She also was invited to France to assist the Association Française de la Gestion Financière on the launching of their shariah mutual funds industry. She is well known for her philanthropic work for women and children, particularly Educate a Girl, in partnership with Facebook’s internet.org foundation and with the support of the World Bank, as well as distribution of emergency supplies during the SWAT earthquake and most recently, food rations during COVID-19/Sindh floods.
Her LADIESFUND project annually holds the national awards for women, presented by the Sindh Governor, as well as has trained over 12,000 women and youth in entrepreneurship. Most recently, it launched The Buraq Center by LADIESFUND, Pakistan’s first all female incubation center and co-working space for women, in partnership with the German Consulate and LUMS Lahore NIC.