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Anna Prouse is an athlete, emergency medical technician, ambulance team leader, journalist, Red Cross International delegate and government advisor with real world experience in some of the most challenging countries on earth.
After a debilitating injury sidelined a promising professional tennis career, Anna has spent her time working to make people’s lives better. First as an ambulance crew member and team leader. Later as a journalist for one of Italy’s largest newspapers, an International Red Cross delegate running a field hospital in downtown Baghdad, and a government advisor for almost a decade in southern Iraq.
As a foreign correspondent for Italy’s major national newspaper “La Repubblica”, Anna reported on countries in various stages of unrest and change. Her work included traveling to Tehran to capture Iranian reactions to the 9/11 attacks, Libya focusing on Gaddafi’s relationship with the Tuareg population, and Yemen when kidnapping Italians was becoming an industry.
After leaving the newspaper and a short time as a freelance journalist, she was approached by the Red Cross to run a field hospital in Baghdad. It was June 2003. What was supposed to be a brief mission, became an 8-year-long adventure: chosen to be an advisor to one of the most controversial and inaccessible Iraqi Ministries, Anna was then appointed by General Petraeus to lead the reconstruction efforts in the rebellious South by embedding her in an area dominated by staunch Iranian militias and advise the local Government.
President Napolitano knighted Anna for her work in Iraq awarding her with the highest ranking honor of the Italian Republic: the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Anna also received the Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. Department of State and the Honorary Red Cross Award for extraordinary courage, competence and dedication to the 2003 – 2005 Red Cross and Red Crescent Mission in Iraq.
Anna published five books in Italy, the last of which “Della mia guerra, della mia pace” a memoir which has received significant media coverage and is being received with enthusiasm by the Italian public (HarperCollins, November 2023). Her previous book “Un’italiana in Iraq” was translated and published in the US under the title “Two Birthdays In Baghdad.”
Anna’s experience in Iraq led governments and companies to require her expertise in other war-torn regions such as Somalia, Syria, Libya and the various bordering countries where her hands-on approach distinguished her from a general, more detached trend.
After two decades in the crossfire, Anna joined X (Google’s “Moonshot Factory”) in 2016 where her experience with complex governments and environments was put to use to launch moonshot technologies in the most remote areas of the world. Anna is now consulting with companies that need her skills to enter markets in complex parts of the world.
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