Path to director began with Rotary scholarship
In 1980, Eve Conway-Ghazi arrived in Evanston, Illinois, to study at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. A graduate of Queen Mary University with a degree in English, she’d recently been a reporter for a newspaper in East London. It was there that her editor, a Rotarian, had told Conway-Ghazi about Rotary’s Ambassadorial Scholarships program. She secured one of the scholarships and found herself in this new country and a new city. Little did she know the changes that lay ahead, or the reason she’d find herself returning to that city in the years to come.
“The scholarship was my first gift from Rotary,” says Conway-Ghazi, who today is serving as a director of Rotary International, one of several prominent leadership roles she’s held at the organization. “It transformed my life, and it left me wanting to transform the lives of other people around the world.”
For Eve Conway-Ghazi, an Ambassadorial Scholarship that funded her master’s in broadcast journalism was just her “first gift from Rotary.”
Image credit: David Gennard
But first those changes. While at Northwestern and working toward a master’s in broadcast journalism, Conway-Ghazi was assigned to serve as the Washington correspondent for KOTV, a CBS affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The news director may have admired the rookie reporter for some unexpected reasons — “Everything you say sounds so intelligent with your British accent” — but the skills Conway-Ghazi acquired at KOTV and Northwestern allowed her to transition from newspapers to radio and television when she returned home to England. After working for a number of broadcast outlets, she spent 20 years at BBC News as a reporter and producer.
While all of this was going on, Conway-Ghazi slowly found her way back to Rotary. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Rotary — which did not admit women as members until the late 1980s — found its way back to Conway-Ghazi. While suffering from the flu, she consulted a doctor, who, as with her early editor, was a Rotarian. He invited her to speak at his club, and after speaking at several other Rotary clubs, Conway-Ghazi joined the Rotary Club of Redbridge, based in Greater London, in 2000. (The club recently merged with another to become the Rotary Club of Barkingside and Redbridge, and Conway-Ghazi remains a member.)
Conway-Ghazi quickly rose through the ranks of Rotary, serving as club president and, in 2012-13, as the first female district governor for Rotary in London. She’d follow that, in 2016-17, with a term as president of Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland.
Eve Conway-Ghazi
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, 1980-81
- President, Rotary International in Great Britain and Ireland, 2016-17
- Director, Rotary International, 2023-present
By then, Conway-Ghazi had been married for a decade. The fact that she and her husband, Robert Hossein Ghazi, met had, in a way, been another gift from Rotary. The two first ran into each other in April 2003 while hurrying to a Rotary district assembly in London’s Covent Garden. Ghazi gave her his business card and invited her to join him on a boat ride. As it happened, Conway-Ghazi was about to depart to the United States for a month and was unable to join him. In the months that followed, Ghazi extended other invitations, which she continued to decline. “He was very persistent,” she’d later remember, “and I was very busy.”
After a year, the two finally had dinner at a Russian restaurant in London. And in April 2006, three years after Rotary had first brought them together — and three days after Conway-Ghazi had returned from filming a BBC documentary about women battling breast cancer in Pakistan with Cherie Blair, the spouse of Prime Minister Tony Blair — the couple were married. It’s another reason, says Conway-Ghazi, that “joining Rotary was the best decision I made in my life.”
At each step of her Rotary journey, Conway-Ghazi followed through on her desire to transform the lives of others. In 2007, wanting to promote inspiring stories about young people, she founded the Rotary Young Citizen Awards in association with BBC News. Five years later, working with Rotary members in London and Mumbai, she organized a vocational training team of medical professionals from London who traveled to India to train doctors, nurses, and health workers in rural Jawhar — a project that helped improve childbirth outcomes there.
Conway-Ghazi participating in a National Immunization Day in India in 2017, and conducting an interview earlier this year for Rotary GB&I’s marketing and membership campaign. Courtesy of Eve Conway-Ghazi
One of Conway-Ghazi’s great passions remains fighting polio, and in 2016 she launched the Purple4Polio campaign in Great Britain and Ireland. That passion stems from what Conway-Ghazi describes as her Rotary moment. At her first National Immunization Day in India, she administered two drops of the polio vaccine to a child as his mother looked on. “She couldn’t speak English, but I could see it in her eyes,” Conway-Ghazi recalls. “Her child had been immunized against polio, and it had been transformative for them. It touched my heart.”
Rotary’s investment in that young journalist has paid off in other ways. Using skills she acquired during her career, Conway-Ghazi produced video interviews for Rotary GB&I’s marketing and membership campaign. “We have to tell the story that what Rotary is all about is projects with impact that save lives,” she says.
Sadly, Robert Ghazi died last December. “The Rotary family is helping me get through,” Conway-Ghazi explains when back in Evanston for a Board meeting. “And I continue to be very busy working as an RI director, which is such a privilege.”
“Rotary transformed my life,” she continues, repeating something she’d said earlier, only this time talking about much more than her Ambassadorial Scholarship. “In a remarkable way, through a network of people, it allowed one person to change the world. Helping to eradicate polio and making history: I never would have done any of that without Rotary. And Rotary continues to offer me so many wonderful opportunities to help others.” The transformed has become the transformer.
This story originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.