HerSphere Insights
Honest, practical perspectives on business, finances, and life as a woman building her future in the UAE.
She offered because she knew: the first aid a new widow needs
When my husband passed away, the last thing on my mind was cooking.
A friend of mine, who had lost her 15 year old son just three months before my husband passed away, offered to come and cook for me.
To say I was shocked is an understatement. I knew she was going through the unimaginable pain of losing her own son, and yet she was generous enough to offer this.
Preparing for the hardest day: a UAE checklist after a terminal diagnosis
"Hi Anna,
I have tried to prepare as best I can for my husband's passing. He has stage 4 cancer. I would like to check if there's anything I have overlooked, if possible, please.
Thank you"
This email landed in my inbox this week, and it broke my heart.
Meet the Partner: Charis Marr, In Good Wealth
For many women rebuilding their lives in the UAE, money is a conversation they don't quite know where to start. Not because information isn't available, but because so much of it comes in the form of a sales pitch or a spreadsheet, with very little room in between for someone to simply understand where they stand and what they want their future to look like.
That is exactly where HerSphere's newest Featured Partner, Charis Marr, comes in.
Inside Her Sphere: A Money Guide Written for Women in the UAE
When someone else has always handled the money, the first bank letter or legal form in your own name can read like a foreign language. That is true for a woman who has just been widowed, for one going through a divorce, and for one who has lived in the UAE for years and simply never needed to look closely until now.
Learning to Step Back: Motherhood at Ten, Raised Alone
At ten, my girls no longer need me the way they did at five, and I am still learning what to do with my hands.
HERSPHERE DUBAI WEEKEND EDIT
WEEKEND AFFORDABLE FINDS | DUBAI
What’s worth doing in Dubai this weekend.
Thursday means one thing… It’s time to plan your weekend!
Every Thursday, we bring you our pick of the best affordable things happening around Dubai — from free family days and creative markets to culture, food and experiences worth leaving the sofa for.
Affordable activities for homeschoolers and any family watching the budget 💛
When my late husband lost his job back in 2024, and we couldn't afford to send the twins back to school, we had to make a decision to homeschool our eight-year-old twins.
What I Want My Children to Remember
There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with grieving in front of your children — the sense that you have to get the performance right, because they're watching and learning from every part of it. I felt it acutely in the months after my husband died, raising my twins largely on my own in Dubai, a long way from the family network I might have had back home.
Introducing Our New Partner & Sponsor - Ride Skipper: Safer Rides for UAE Women
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes after loss — not the grief itself, but the sheer logistics of it. The phone calls. The paperwork. The appointments that cannot wait. And that drive to the cemetery or the crematorium itself.
Abu Dhabi's New Co-Parenting Charter
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with co-parenting through a divorce—not just the practical logistics, but the constant, unspoken negotiation over what's "reasonable." Who decides which school the children attend? Whether a text about a doctor's appointment gets answered. Whether a difficult conversation happens in front of the kids or away from them. For many women rebuilding a life here after a marriage ends, that ambiguity is its own quiet burden.
Abu Dhabi has just taken a concrete step to reduce it.
Connect Generations Dubai: What Families Pass Down
Yesterday afternoon, I sat in the dark at Theatre of Digital Art in Madinat Jumeirah with my twins on either side of me. For two hours, nobody reached for a phone.
We were at Connect Generations, a forum organised by Hidden Hero and People of the Future, the company founded by Olga Sapozhnikova—a Dubai-based documentary filmmaker and former Russian diplomat who has spent the last two decades trying to bridge divides, first between nations, now between generations of the same family (Khaleej Times, 2025).
Introducing The Bureau
Announcing HerSphere's new partnership with The Bureau Business Center, Opera Grand Downtown: two complimentary workshop sessions, then 30% off Day Passes and 50% off meeting-room bookings — now updated to include their 25 Sept Block Party invite.
The New UAE Banking Rule Every Freelancer and Sole Trader Should Know About This Week
When I first opened a business bank account here as a sole proprietor, it took weeks of back-and-forth, unclear fee schedules, and a fair amount of guessing about what I was and wasn't entitled to ask for. If you've set up a sole establishment or freelance permit in the UAE and gone through your own bank's onboarding process, you'll probably recognise that feeling—you're a real customer, but somehow the experience doesn't always feel like it.
That changes, formally, this week.
Dubai Eye Interview about My Loss Experience and HerSphere Mission
Last week I sat down with Katie Chambers on Dubai Eye 103.8's The Agenda and spoke, live, about losing my husband and about the strange, exhausting, often absurd process of what comes after. I said yes to that interview because I believe silence has done more damage to grieving families in this country than anyone likes to admit. But saying yes and actually sitting in that studio chair were two very different things.
What Happens to Your UAE Bank Account After Death — And How to Protect Your Family Before It's an Issue
Most of us don't think about what happens to our bank account when we're gone. Then a friend mentions a widow who couldn't pay her children's school fees for weeks because her late husband's account — the one they'd shared for a decade — was frozen the moment the bank found out he'd died. Suddenly it's not a hypothetical.
What You Need to Know Before September
A good number of the women in our community set up a business licence here for the first time after a divorce, a bereavement, or simply a decision to finally build something of their own. Many of them opened a business bank account alone — signed the paperwork, agreed to a fee schedule they didn't have a lawyer double-check, and hoped for the best. From mid-September 2026, they'll have considerably more protection than they had a year ago.
How Much Will You Really Need to Retire?
A 40-year-old professional assumes their pension will be enough but has never calculated their retirement income needs. With 25 working years remaining, the gap between assumption and reality has time to be closed—but only if it is identified now.
Retirement planning in the UAE sits in a particular category of financial conversations that people consistently postpone. There is always a reason — the children need something, the business needs investment, there is a move coming, a job change planned. And retirement feels distant enough that deferring feels safe.
It is not safe. And for expats in the UAE, it carries a specific risk that does not apply in countries with state pension systems: there is no fallback. No UAE government pension for expat residents. No universal credit. No NHS. When you stop earning, everything comes from what you have built.
That makes the calculation not just useful—it is essential.
What Motherhood Taught Me About Grief (And Vice Versa)
Motherhood hit differently this August.
Not in a poetic way. In the way where I stood in a school supplies aisle at Carrefour — just me, the twins, and a list — and felt the full weight of being the only one. Every permission slip. Every "Mum, can we?" Every moment where I used to turn to someone who knew my children as well as I did.
That voice is gone. And I'm learning, slowly, to be both people.
I thought grief would be the hardest part of this year. It is hard. But I didn't anticipate this specific thing: the aloneness of parenting decisions. Not the logistics — though those are relentless. The quiet absence of the person who knew my children inside and out, who could say "you're overthinking it" or "actually, this one matters."
Now I have to figure that out alone.
What I'm learning is that motherhood doesn't pause for grief. The twins still need breakfast. They still argue. They still need me to show up fully, on the days when I'm running on empty.
And most days, somehow, I do.
I'm also learning that the bar I had in my head for "good enough" parenting was built for a two-parent household. It doesn't apply here. We're building something different—and that's allowed.
If you're raising children alone in the UAE, what part of solo parenting took you most by surprise?
#HerSphereUAE #SoloMotherhoodUAE #WidowMom #SingleMotherDubai #GriefAndMotherhood #RaisingKidsDubai #MotherhoodInUAE #DubaiMums
The Six-Month Window: UAE Residency Rights for Widows and Divorcees
In the first weeks after my husband died, I was managing a funeral, two grieving children, and a household that suddenly had no idea what came next. Immigration paperwork was nowhere near the top of my list. It should have been, because in the UAE, a woman's right to stay is tied to her marriage in ways that don't pause for grief, and there's a deadline attached.
Do men grieve differently?
Yesterday I met a man over the coffee who told me about the traumatic loss of his wife four years ago.
We ended up talking for quite a while about grief and what happens to us when we lose the person we thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives with. We talked about how difficult it is in the beginning, how life somehow continues around you even when your own life feels like it has stopped, and how, eventually, you have to start finding your way forward.
One of the things we talked about was how important it is to have someone to talk to. Someone who understands what you are going through and doesn't need you to explain why you feel the way you do. Someone who won't judge you or tell you that you should be feeling better by now. And at some point during our conversation, he asked me a question that I hadn't really thought about before.