Souad Slim has been a committed member of the Lebanese KAAD partner committee for more than twenty years. Both with her profession and her KAAD commitment, she is helping to give the young generation in the Middle East a future and counteract the brain drain.

Souad Slim was born in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. During her youth, she volunteered to teach illiterate adult women in the suburbs of Beirut and supported students in the same area with tutorials. Her academic passion is the rich history of her home country, which was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. After studying history in Lebanon and France, she wrote her dissertation on the history of Lebanon in the 18th and 19th centuries and received her first doctorate from Sorbonne University. In her second doctoral thesis, this time at the University of Birmingham in the field of Christian-Muslim relations, she focussed on the history of the Greek Orthodox charitable foundations(waqf) in Ottoman Lebanon. The development of the education system is also one of her main areas of research, for example the history and significance of the Greek Orthodox schools founded by Russian missionaries in the Middle East from the 1880s onwards.

While Souad Slim has always been passionate about uncovering the past, she has also endeavoured to bring the past together with the present and make the present better for her fellow citizens. After obtaining her first doctorate in France, she returned to her home country in the middle of the Lebanon War (1975-1990) and taught history at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. During this time, in the midst of the war, she married Salim Slim and had three children, Salam, Saad and Samah. She has been a professor of history, cultural studies and methodology at the University of Balamand since 1987. She is also currently Director of the Centre for Documentation and History at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Middle Eastern Studies.