Apolitical's 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy

Aisling Swaine is Professor of Gender Studies, School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College Dublin. Aisling’s research and teaching focuses on conflict-related violence against women, transitional justice and global gender policy, with a focus on gender-based violence and on the women, peace and security agenda. She has published widely on these issues, including her book ‘Conflict-related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition’ published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, which contributed new ideas on the relationship between gender-based violence within and outside of armed conflict. Aisling uses academic theory and research to further the policy and practice of advancing gender equality and tackling gender-based violence. Over a career working globally to progress gender equality, Aisling has also worked with UN agencies and international NGOs in humanitarian and peacebuilding settings, specialising in implementing policy and programming responses to gender-based violence. She has also worked at global policy levels with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and UN Women. She continues to consult to international organizations and has published policy papers, reports and guidelines for many international organisations, such as UN Women. She is affiliated with the LSE Centre on Women, Peace and Security, a Visiting Fellow at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University, and previously a Hauser Global Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at the School of Law, New York University.

Akila Radhakrishnan is the President of the Global Justice Center, where she leads its work to achieve gender equality and human rights. In her time at GJC, Akila has led the development of groundbreaking legal work on both abortion access in conflict and the role that gender plays in genocide. Akila is a globally-recognized voice on issues of reproductive rights, gender-based violence, and justice and accountability. Her unique expertise as a feminist international lawyer is sought by policymakers, academics, media, and grassroots actors around the world. She has briefed the United Nations Security Council and the United Kingdom and European Parliaments, and regularly advises governments and multilateral institutions on issues of gender equality and human rights. Akila’s expert analysis can also be seen across popular media, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, CNN, and more. Prior to the Global Justice Center, she worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, DPK Consulting, and Drinker, Biddle & Reath, LLP. Akila received her J.D. with a concentration in international law from the University of California, Hastings and holds a B.A. in Political Science and Art History from the University of California, Davis. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, serves on the Board of Directors of Reprieve US, is a member of the Oxford Group of Practitioners on Fact-Finding and Accountability, and an expert on the International Bar Association Human Rights Law Committee.

Gayatri Patel is a longtime expert and advocate for gender equality with two decades of experience in both the government and NGO sector advocating for the rights of women and girls globally. She currently serves as the Director of Gender Advocacy at CARE USA, where she leads advocacy initiatives on gender-based violence (GBV), women’s economic empowerment, and gender equality broadly. Drawing on her policy expertise in holding governments accountable for addressing GBV, Gayatri co-chairs the Coalition to End Violence Against Women and Girls Globally – a broad coalition of NGOs collectively advocating for stronger policies and programs to respond to GBV worldwide. She also co-chairs the Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality and sits on the Steering Committee of the Coalition for Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States. Prior to joining CARE, Gayatri spent a decade at the U.S. State Department advising on a variety of gender and humanitarian issues in the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration; the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons; and the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. In these roles, she led initiatives to combat human trafficking, support women migrant workers, address GBV in humanitarian emergencies, and uphold women’s and girls’ rights in UN resolutions and human rights reviews. She also served as the Director of Legal Programming at the Africa Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) organization providing pro bono legal services and protection to refugees and asylum seekers in Cairo, Egypt, which included supporting survivors of GBV and other forms of abuse/persecution.

Professor Jacqui True is a political scientist and international relations scholar focused on the prevention of gender-based violence globally. She is the founding Director of the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University (Monash GPS), Australia and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Jacqui is recognized internationally for her research on the political economy of violence against women and path-breaking research on the connections between gender-based violence, misogyny and violent extremism, in partnership with UN Women. Jacqui champions the need to connect research with policy and practice. She has developed substantial research into policy partnerships with the UN, the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum, governments and civil society organizations available in policy briefs and the PeaceFem App. Together with Sara Davies, she brought together 93 leading practitioners, policymakers and researchers to build a global community of practice to advance the Women, Peace and Security agenda and its core pillar to protect and prevent gender-based violence in the publication "The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace and Security." Professor True is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed articles and books. Her book, The Political Economy of Violence Against Women (Oxford) won three international scholarly awards with Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Secretary-General Madeleine Rees named it her top book to read in Foreign Policy’s series on women peacebuilders. (2019). Her new book, Violence against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2020) translates the major evidence and knowledge on violence against women to reach a broader policymaking and practitioner audience.

Joanna Vergoth, LCSW, NCPsyA, is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice specializing in trauma. For the last 25 years she has dedicated herself to the healing of trauma, including the treatment of firefighters and Cantor Fitzgerald employees impacted by 9/11, for which she received commendations from the mayor of New York City and the governor of New York state. She also developed and implemented “Care for the Caregivers,” a psychotherapeutic program for counselors and case managers suffering from secondary traumatic stress (STS). In addition to her public service, private practice, clinic and advocacy work, Joanna has also studied and volunteered with organizations in London, Cairo, New York and Chicago which provide services to refugees, children of divorce, recovering prostitutes, and immigrant African women and girls. Over the past fifteen years she has become a committed activist in the cause of female genital mutilation (FGM/C), first as Coordinator of the Midwest Network on Female Genital Cutting, and then with the creation of forma, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing comprehensive, culturally-sensitive clinical services to women affected by FGM/C. More recently Joanna is providing psychotherapeutic services to FGM/C survivors who, as children, also suffered extreme traumas from organized Ritual Abuse and Mind Control.

Kirthi Jayakumar is a feminist researcher and lawyer from Chennai, India. She founded and runs The Gender Security Project, one of the few WPS centres in the global south, which works at the cusp of gender, security, peace, and conflict through research, reportage, and documentation. Kirthi coded an app for survivors of gender-based violence called Saahas, which works as a web and mobile app. She taught herself to code and created a web app, a mobile app and a Facebook ChatBot to support survivors of gender-based violence across 196 countries, and to assist bystander intervention. Her areas of interest include gender studies, peace and conflict research, security studies, and international human rights and humanitarian law. Kirthi is a member of the Advisory Working Group for the Beijing+25 Process and a member of the Advisory Group at the Every Woman Treaty. She is a member of the PIE Steering Committee at World Pulse, a Peer Reviewer at the Racial Equality Index. Kirthi was a Commonwealth Scholar at CTPSR, Coventry University and graduated with an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies. She also holds an MA in Sustainable Peace in a Contemporary World from UPEACE and a BALLB (Hons.) from SOEL, Chennai.

Mona Lena Krook is Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Women & Politics Ph.D. Program at Rutgers University. She has published widely on gender and political representation, particularly on electoral gender quotas and the impact of women in public office. Her first book, Quotas for Women in Politics: Gender and Candidate Selection Reform Worldwide (Oxford University Press, 2009), won two major book awards from the American Political Science Association. Her most recent book, Violence against Women in Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), explores rising attacks against women in public life around the globe. Bridging the worlds of theory and practice, Krook argues that violence against women in politics is not simply ‘politics as usual,’ or a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence as physical attacks on political rivals. Rather, violence against women in politics is a distinct gender-based phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors, questioning their rights as women to participate in the political process at all. Since 2015, she has collaborated with the National Democratic Institute on its #NotTheCost campaign, and more recently, she launched a website at https://www.vawpolitics.org/ to gather resources and foster greater awareness of violence against women in politics worldwide. Funded by the National Science Foundation and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, her work has also involved extensive collaboration with colleagues at the Inter-Parliamentary Union, UN Women, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Organization of American States, and the U.S. Congress, among others.

Madhu Mehra is a feminist lawyer at Partners for Law in Development (PLD), a women’s rights non-profit in India where she heads research and training initiatives. Her innovative approach to gender and social justice has been to anchor policy and activism within rigorous evidence collection and research through genuinely collaborative methods. Her work critiques the predominant reliance on criminalisation at the cost of transformatory victim centric approaches to redress gender based violence; whereas her advocacy for sexual justice combines accountability for sexual violence with decriminalisation of adultery, adolescent sexuality and same sex relations. Through PLD she leads the National Coalition Advocating for Adolescent Concerns. Beyond India, she has contributed towards human rights norm setting, review and capacity development processes. She undertook the review of 15 years of the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (1994-2009) for the OHCHR; and contributed extensively towards training government, civil society and judiciary for implementing the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in South and Southeast Asia, including through the IWRAW-Asia Pacific. She helped institutionise the feminist legal theory and practice trainings within the Asia Pacific Forum for Women, Law and Development in mid 90s, when critical legal studies was yet unavailable in formal legal education. An alumni of law schools at the universities of Delhi and Warwick, Madhu was awarded visiting fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick by the Pavate Foundation and the Institute of Advanced Studies, respectively.

Nahla Valji is the Senior Adviser, Gender in the United Nations’ Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In this role she coordinates the UN-EU Spotlight Initiative to Eliminate Violence against Women and Girls, a 500m euro global partnership in support of the Sustainable Development Goals. She is also responsible for leading gender policy setting and supporting the Secretary-General’s Gender Parity Strategy among other efforts. Prior to this she was the Acting Chief/ Deputy Chief of the Peace and Security section in UN Women’s headquarters in New York, where she led for some years the organization’s work on peacekeeping, peace negotiations, transitional justice, and rule of law, involving both global programming and policy work, particularly with regards to the Security Council. In 2015, she headed the Secretariat for the Global Study on implementation of resolution 1325, a comprehensive study requested by the Security Council for the 15-year review of women, peace and security. She founded and was managing editor of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Gender and Conflict. Her most recent publication is a co-authored article on violent misogyny and violent extremism. Prior to joining the UN, Nahla worked in South Africa, where she led the regional transitional justice work of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and managed the African Transitional Justice Research Network.

Patricia Viseur Sellers is the Special Adviser to the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor on Gender. She is an international criminal lawyer with more than two decades of experience working in the fields of international criminal justice and human rights as a practitioner, lecturer, policy adviser, and advocate for women's rights and gender equality. She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College of the University of Oxford where she teaches international criminal law and human rights law. She has been widely consulted on international criminal law and humanitarian law. Ms Sellers has been a Special Legal Consultant to UN Women, to the Gender and Women’s Rights Division of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and to the UN Secretary’s General’s Special Representative to Children in Armed Conflict. In 2012, she was a member of an expert panel to review the UN Office of Internal Oversight that has initial jurisdiction over UN Peacekeepers. She was the Legal Advisor for Gender, the Acting Head of the Legal Advisory Section and a prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”) from 1994 until February 2007. She developed the legal strategies and was a member of the trial teams working on the Akayesu, Furundzija, and Kunarac cases. These landmark decisions remain the pre-imminent legal standards for the interpretation of sexual violence as war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture and enslavement. She has lectured extensively on humanitarian law and international criminal law. Ms Sellers is the author of numerous articles including: Wartime Female Slavery: Enslavement? Cornell University Journal of International Law, Vol. 44:1 (2011); Rape and Sexual Violence, in the critically received, A NEW COMMENTARY TO THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS (Oxford University Press, 2015), and, (Re)Considering the Gender Jurisprudence in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF GENDER AND ARMED CONFLICT (Oxford university Press, 2017). She is a recipient of the Prominent Women in International Law Award by the American Society of International Law. She holds an Honorary Doctorate in Law from the City University of New York, as well as an Honorary Fellow for Lifetime Achievement from the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania, her alma mater. Ms Sellers was also awarded the National Bar Association’s Ron Brown International Lawyer Prize. [Image Credit: ICC-CPI]

Reyhana Patel is the Head of Communications and Government Relations at the international NGO Islamic Relief Canada. Reyhana is a former BBC News journalist and lifelong advocate and champion for change in civil society and minority communities on issues around gender-based violence, racism, and women's rights. She leads the gender-based violence portfolio at Islamic Relief where she specializes in developing policy, research and advocacy campaigns on tackling religious and cultural norms that are used to carry out acts of gender-based violence. Reyhana has worked with organizations around the world to call on governments to generate research and data on female genital mutilation/cutting. Reyhana writes regularly for mainstream media outlets and her work has been featured on the BBC, CBC, Huffington Post and Toronto Star.

Sarah Martin has over 20 years of experience in working on gender-based violence in humanitarian settings. In her career, she has focused on research, advocacy and program management for issues like sexual exploitation and abuse by UN Peacekeepers, removing barriers to access care for survivors of sexual violence, promoting women’s rights, gender equality, and building capacity to address gender-based violence in humanitarian emergencies. She is currently Lead Associate at Gender Associations, a gender, peace, and security consulting firm based in Berlin, Germany. As a consultant, her clients have included the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Women’s Refugee Commission, International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, UNFPA and many others. She is currently the co-moderator of the GBV Area of Responsibility’s Community of Practice that supports over 800 GBV in emergencies specialists. She has also served as the Inter-agency Regional Emergency GBV Advisor for Asia for the GBV Area of Responsibility, Senior Gender Advisor for UNHCR in the Syrian Refugee Response in Jordan and Humanitarian Affairs Specialist at Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff (she/her) is a Malawian human rights lawyer and legal researcher with over 15 years’ experience on the intersections of VAWG/GBV and the law. Trained as a lawyer, Sarai has gone on to specialize in human rights and democratization in Africa as well as women's and gender studies. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Gender and Justice Unit (GJU), an organization that focuses on legal empowerment as a catalyst for gender equality and social justice. Through GJU, Sarai provides free legal assistance and trauma support for victims of gender-based violence (GBV); the GJU is conducting research into the experiences of women during the ongoing COVID19 pandemic and has developed simplified and translated legal empowerment tools to bridge the gap between women and the justice they seek for GBV. Her research focus has always been on women and access to justice, and the intersections between the letter of the law and women's lived realities. She has blogged, published, conducted training, agitated about, written and researched various aspects of women and the law. Sarai serves on the Boards of AFIDEP, the HIV Justice Network and the Young Feminists Network. Sarai lives and works in Malawi.

Sareta Ashraph is an international criminal lawyer, with expertise in the gendered commission and impact of international crimes, notably genocide. She currently directs field investigations for the Iraq-based UN Investigative Team to promote Accountability for the crimes committed by Da’esh/ ISIL (UNITAD). Sareta is also a senior legal consultant to a number of projects with the Center for Justice and Accountability, focused on case-building efforts concerning crimes committed during the Syrian conflict. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, where her research focuses on an intersectional analysis of barriers to achieving accountability for mass atrocity crimes against children. Sareta has a long-standing focus on ISIL’s crimes against the Yazidis, and specifically on ensuring that the gendered nature of the violence is understood and surfaced in case files built for prosecution. In 2018, she wrote the Global Justice Center’s landmark report “Beyond Killing: Gender, Genocide and Obligations under International Law”. Today she continues to advise on gender-competent analytical approaches to the documentation of allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity, including as perpetrated against the Rohingya of Myanmar and the Uyghur community of Xianjiang, China. In 2012, Sareta co-founded ATLAS to empower, support and connect women working in, or embarking on, a career in public international law. Today ATLAS is a dynamic global community of over 8000 lawyers, activists, and jurists working to ensure that women are represented, valued, and supported at all levels of the international legal profession. Sareta is a national of Trinidad and Tobago.[Image Credit: Darrin Vanselow/Getty Images]

Annette Wallgren is the Programme Management Officer on Gender & Climate Change at UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Asia Pacific. Annette joined the UNEP regional office team 5 years ago as the first full time gender expert and where she led the development and approval of a unique stand-alone project on gender, renewable energy and climate change. The project, EmPower, is now in its second year of implementation in Bangladesh, Viet Nam and Cambodia, placing women’s leadership at the heart of climate action and the transition to clean energy. Recognized for her expertise and successes in institutionalizing gender equality within UNEP, Annette has been interviewed in the newly released Routledge book Negotiating Gender Expertise in Environment and Development and named by Business Insider as one of the 10 leaders transforming energy in Asia. Prior to joining UNEP, Annette worked in crisis management for the Government of Sweden, women's political and economic participation in peacebuilding at UN Women in Kosovo, as a research assistant at PeaceWomen at the UN Headquarters in New York and with various NGOs in India and South Africa on women’s rights and disaster risk reduction programmes. She has also conducted research in Ethiopia examining gender roles in times of a refugee crisis. Annette holds a Master’s in Politics and International Studies from Uppsala University specializing in Peace and Conflict.

Dr. Charlotte Karam is the founding director of the Center of Inclusive Business and Leadership for Women and a tenured Associate Professor at the Olayan School of Business, American University of Beirut. She and her team have secured over $10 million to support work on inclusive HR systems in the MENA. Through a Middle East Partnership Initiative grant she led development of The KIP Index- the first Arab MENA sector-based measure of women’s recruitment, retention and promotion, which includes women’s lived experiences and employer HR data. In 2021, she led the launch of The SAWI Project, mobilizing a transnational network of Arab employers to engage decision makers in localized strategies toward dignified work for women. Her work, as a scholar-activist, contributes to overlapping conversations in HR, Business Ethics, public policy, and feminist praxis. She had an active role in mobilizing, drafting, and engaging in parliamentary subcommittees that led to the first anti-sexual harassment law in Lebanon. The U.S. Department of State recognized this work by naming her as a Global Gender Champion. She works with regional employers to promote feminist approaches to inclusive HR strategies. Charlotte is also a highly engaged teacher of executive and university-level courses in Inclusive HR Systems, Feminist Business Ethics, and Leadership Development. She is also a member of various academic communities, the Area Editor at the Journal of Business Ethics for ‘Feminisms and Business Ethics’, and a founding member of Khaddit Beirut in response to the August 4th explosion that hit the Lebanese capital.

Diane Elson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK and a former Chair of the UK Women’s Budget Group (2010-16). She chaired the Commission on a Gender Equal Economy set up by the Women’s Budget Group (2019-20). She is also a member of the UN Committee for Development Policy (2013-2021), adviser to UN Women (and previously to UNIFEM where in 2000 she initiated the report on Progress of the World’s Women) and a former Vice President of the International Association for Feminist Economics (2004-6). She has regularly contributed to panels at annual meetings of Commission on Status of Women and served as Adviser for Oxfam and other NGOs. She has published widely on gender equality, human rights and economic justice, and is one of the founders of gender-aware macroeconomic analysis, and gender budgeting. Her recent publications include: (with R. Balakrishnan and J. Heintz) Rethinking Economics for Social Justice: The Radical Potential of Human Rights, Routledge, London, 2016. ‘Financing for Gender Equality: How to Budget in Compliance with Human Rights Standards’ in N. Burn and Z. Kahn (eds.) Financing for Gender Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights through Gender Responsive Budgeting, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ‘Securing the social and economic rights of women in economic policy making’ in Reilly, N. (ed.) Human Rights of Women, Springer, 2018. She was awarded the 2016 Leontief Prize for Advancing Frontiers of Economic Thought by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.

Dr Jemimah Njuki is the Director for Africa at the International Food Policy Research Institute, where she oversees IFPRI’s programs including on Gender Equality in Food Systems in the Africa region. In 2020, Dr Njuki was named by the UN Food Systems Special Envoy as Custodian for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment for the UN Food Systems Summit 2021. She has worked for over 20 years in gender equality and women’s empowerment in Africa and Asia. Prior to joining the International Food Policy Research Institute, she led the Growth and Economic Opportunities program at Canada’s International Development Research Centre, the Women in Agriculture Program at CARE USA, and the Poverty, Gender and Impact Program at the International Livestock Research Institute. She is the Convener of the East and Southern Africa Gender and Livelihoods Network, and the founding Editor of the Journal of Gender, Agriculture and Food Security, a journal that promotes the voices of scientists from the global south working on gender equality. Dr Njuki is an Aspen New Voices Fellow and serves on various Boards including the African Women in Agriculture Research and Development (AWARD), the Africa-EU Partnership on Agriculture and Food Security, the International Panel on Food Systems, and the Africa Voices Foundation. Dr Njuki writes extensively on issues of women’s empowerment, gender-based violence, women’s rights. She is the founder of the One Million Girls Trust, a trust that provides educational scholarships for girls and computers to rural schools so that girls have access to technology from an early age. Dr Njuki holds a PhD in Development Studies with a specialization of gender and agriculture systems.

Dr. Kalyani Menon-Sen is a feminist researcher and activist who has been working for over twenty-five years on issues of women's rights, particularly the impacts of neo-liberal economic policies on women. She has contributed to critiques of economic policies and policy-making processes, and has been active in initiatives to build economic literacy for women workers and women farmers. She has written and campaigned on issues of violence against women, particularly state violence and its linkage with economic policies. She has researched and written on issues of safety, dignity and rights of women in the workplace and has supported a range of organisations in setting up systems for prevention and action on sexual harassment. Kalyani has a long association with UNDP and its gender mainstreaming journey. As a Gender At Work Associate, she has worked with UN agencies, think-tanks and research groups, development agencies, community groups and women's movement organisations to design and facilitate action-learning initiatives and systems change processes.

Dr. Leonora Risse is a co-founder and National Chair of the Women in Economics Network (WEN) in Australia, which aims to lift the representation and elevate the contributions of women in the economics profession. She is a Lecturer in Economics at RMIT University, a Research Fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow with the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, and previously served as a public policy economist for the Australian Government. Leonora’s research on gender equality uses real world data to understand gender gaps in the workforce and broader economic outcomes, incorporating insights from psychology to investigate the influence of societal norms and gender biases and understand resistance to equality initiatives. Her research contributes to shifting the focus of gender equality policies away from a deficit approach of ‘fixing women’ towards dismantling the sources of implicit and systemic biases that generate gender inequities in the first place. Her contributions extend to broader issues of wellbeing and social disadvantage, including addressing inequality of opportunity experienced in Indigenous communities. To convert research on gender equality into action, Leonora’s projects include developing platforms to communicate evidence-based policy solutions to organisations and the wider community, and supporting governments to apply a gender lens to economic policy design including in response to the pandemic through gender responsive budgeting. Looking ahead to the economic policy-makers of the future, Leonora has contributed to creating educational resources and curriculum approaches that promote stronger equality, inclusion and belonging within our next generation of economics students.

Meenu Vadera is a feminist and social entrepreneur working in India to enable resource-poor women to empower themselves and access livelihoods with dignity. She is the founder and Executive Director of Azad Foundation; and the founder of Sakha Consulting Wings, which provides safe and reliable transport for women, by women. ‘Women on Wheels’ is an innovative strategic intervention that disrupts gender relations within homes, in communities and in the market place by supporting women to claim remunerative, skill-based and non-traditional spaces in the transport industry. Meenu has worked, nationally and internationally, over the last thirty years on a range of issues concerning women’s rights. She holds a Masters in Social Development and Public Policy from the London School of Economics, and she has published articles that spring from her learning in working directly with communities of women. Azad and Sakha have received several awards and recognitions since their inception in 2008. In 2018, Sakha received the Booking Booster award from Booking.Com. Meenu was the recipient of the International Inspiration Award at the IBM iX everywoman in Travel Awards in 2018. A TedXYouth speaker, Meenu was also awarded the first prize in the Business and Enterprise category of the “100 Women: Unseen Powerful Women Who Change The World” list by One World Action in October 2011. The US Embassy in India recognised her contribution towards women’s empowerment and transforming the lives of women in India in 2015.

Mirai Chatterjee is the Director of the Social Security Team at Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), a union that helps almost 2 million members in India obtain work and income security, financial services and primary health care. She is also Managing Trustee of Lok Swasthya SEWA Trust. She is responsible for SEWA’s Health Care, Child Care and Insurance programmes. She is currently Chairperson of the National Insurance VimoSEWA Cooperative Ltd and actively involved with the Lok Swasthya Health Cooperative, of which she is a founder. Both cooperatives are promoted by SEWA. She joined SEWA in 1984 and was its General Secretary after its Founder, Ela Bhatt. Ms Chatterjee serves on the Boards of several organizations, including the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Save the Children and PRADAN. She was advisor to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector and is in the Advisory Group on Community Action of the National Rural Health Mission. She was also a Commissioner in the World Health Organization’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. She was a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), appointed by the Prime Minister of India in 2010. She was conferred the Global Achievement award by the School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Chatterjee has a B.A. from Harvard University in History and Science and a Masters from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health, USA.

Naila Kabeer is Joint Professor of Gender and International Development at the Departments of International Development and Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. She is also an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2020. She has had extensive experience in teaching, training and advisory work in the field of gender, poverty, livelihoods and citizenship, with recent publications including ‘Beyond the weapons of the weak: organizing women in the informal economy’ (Zed Press), ‘Group rights and gender justice: exploring tensions within an indigenous community in India’ (LSE Institute of Inequalities) and Women workers and the politics of claims-making in globalizing economy’ (UNRISD, Geneva). She recently co-edited a Special Issue of Feminist Economics on Feminist Economic Perspectives on Gender and Covid-19 (https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2021/02/202102181600/gender) and is working as an advisor to the Gates-funded Gender and Covid-19 research programme with colleagues at LSE and elsewhere. She was the president of the International Association of Feminist Economists (2018-2019) and is also on the editorial board of Feminist Economics and of Development and Change. She is on the board of the Women’s Rights Programme of the Open Society Foundation, on the European board of the International Centre for Research on Women (Washington) and the advisor group of the Better Works Program, ILO, Geneva. She has worked with a range of non-governmental organizations, including BRAC (Bangladesh), PRADAN (India), OXFAM (UK), bilateral agencies, including DFID (UK), SIDA (Sweden) and NORAD (Norway) as well as multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, UN-Women and the ILO.

Parimita Mohanty works for the UN Environment Programme as their Programme Management Officer, Renewable Energy in the UNEP Office for Asia and the Pacific. She has more than 18 years of experience in sustainable energy, women’s economic empowerment and climate change and has worked on evidence-driven gender inclusive policies and strategies, technology transfer and climate action plans in more than 15 countries. Prior to joining UNEP, Parimita worked with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India where she led the technology unit of the Lighting a Billion Lives campaign and advanced smart grid initiatives for the socio-economic benefit of communities. For this work, she received the National Association of Software and Service Companies social innovation award in 2010 and graphical system design achievement award in 2012. She has been a visiting researcher at universities in the US and Europe and authored or edited 7 books and more than 25 peer reviewed publications on climate change and socio-economic development. She holds a M.Tech degree in Energy Science and Technology and a PhD on Micro-Grids and smart grids from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. Aside from her work on climate change, she is also a national-level cricket player from India.

Renana Jhabvala is an Indian social worker, who has been active for decades in organising women in the informal economy into trade unions, co-operatives and financial institutions in India, and has been extensively involved in policy issues relating to poor women and the informal economy. She is best known for her long association with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), India, and for her writings on issues of women in the informal economy. She is presently the President of SEWA Bharat, the All-India Federation of SEWAs. In 1990, she was awarded a Padma Shri from the Government of India for her contributions in the field of social work. In April 2012, She was Chancellor Gandhigram Rural University (2012-2017) and was Member of UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment (2016-2017). She holds a B.Sc. (Maths) from Hindu College, Delhi University, a BA (Math) from Harvard University, and a MA (Eco.) from Yale University. She was a member of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment in 2016-2017, the Chairperson of WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) and the Chairperson of HomeNet South Asia. Her books include The City Makers : How women are building a sustainable future for Urban India: co-authored with Bijal Brahmbhatt; "Basic Income" : A Transformative Policy for India: co-edited by Sarath Davala, Soumya Kapoor Mehta and Guy Standing; The Idea of Work: co-authored with Ela Bhatt; Social Income and Insecurity: A Study in Gujarat: co-authored with Guy Standing, Jeemol Unni, and Uma Rani. Routledge, 2010; and Empowering Women in an Insecure World: Joining SEWA Makes a Difference: co-authored with Sapna Desai and Jignasa Dave. SEWA Academy, 2010.

Suneeta Dhar is a Gender Specialist with four decades of experience on advancing women’s human rights. She has worked with civil society and international organizations. She coordinated the India Unit for the historic preparatory process for Beijing ’95 Conference, mobilizing grassroots women leaders across diverse sectors, locations and social identities. She later worked with erstwhile UNIFEM at the Delhi and New York offices, managing the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women. Suneeta was formerly Director of Jagori, a feminist group in Delhi, and is currently a Senior Advisor with them. She has designed multi-stakeholder programs, engendering rural women’s livelihoods, ending violence against women, and building safer spaces for women/girls. As a feminist activist, she supports grassroots movement building, amplifying voices of women in their full diversity, especially from marginalized communities. As an educator, she facilitates capacity-building programs for policy-makers, functionaries, and practitioners. She has co-authored research studies, training manuals, and papers on women’s safety, gender and SDGs, and women’s rights. At a policy level, Suneeta has served on Expert Committees of the National Commission for Women and the Supreme Court’s Committee on Widow’s Rehabilitation. She is a member of the Beijing+25 and Civil Society Advisory Group of UN Women (India). As a member of the Global Coalition on Inclusive and Safe Spaces for Women/Girls, that is represented on the Global Leadership of the Generation Equality Action Coalition on Ending Gender Based Violence, Suneeta contributes to the groups’ transformative feminist agenda-setting process. As a Co-Founder and Chair of the South Asia Women Foundation India, she advocates for resources to advance women and trans rights.

Dr. Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg currently serves as the Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD), which is working towards inclusive, agriculture-driven prosperity for the African continent by strengthening the production and dissemination of more gender responsive agricultural research and innovation. Born in Kenya, Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg holds a PhD and an M.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Minnesota, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and a Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from Whitman College in Washington, U.S.A. Prior to joining AWARD, Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg founded and served as Executive Director of Akili Dada, an award-winning leadership incubator that invests in high-achieving young women from under-resourced families, who are passionate about driving change in their communities. She was also an assistant professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and a lecturer in International Relations at Hekima College, a constituent college of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. Her academic research and teaching interests centered on African politics, gender, international relations, ethnicity, and democratization, and the role of technology in social activism. She has received widespread recognition for her work, including being honored as a White House Champion of Change by the Obama Administration, named one of the 100 Most Influential Africans by New African magazine, and recognized as a Ford Foundation Champion of Democracy. Dr. Kamau-Rutenberg has also been awarded the United Nations Intercultural Innovation Award, named one of Kenya’s Top 40 Women Under Age 40, and is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow.

Alanna Armitage is the Director of the Regional Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia of UNFPA, the United Nations Sexual and Reproductive Health Agency. She has championed women’s health and rights over the past three decades in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, including as UNFPA in Brazil, and Country Director for Argentina and Paraguay. As Director of UNFPA’s Geneva Office, she led the Fund’s Geneva-based multilateral interactions on global health, human rights and humanitarian response. Alanna connects social influencers as part of the “Let’s Talk!” movement, opening up space to speak about harmful taboos around women’s health and bodies. An avid supporter of intergenerational leadership, Alanna currently acts as a mentor (and mentee) of a number of young women leaders. In addition to her degrees in Cultural Anthropology and International Development Studies, Alanna is dedicated to lifelong learning and during the past 15 years completed a post-graduate degree in Health Systems Management from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and is about to finish a PhD at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies focused on the impact of demographic anxiety on gender equality in Eastern Europe. She speaks English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Alanna lives in Istanbul and is a proud mother of four young adults who all call themselves feminists. [Image Credit: UNFPA]

Dr. Claudia Garcia-Moreno is Unit Head (Addressing the needs of vulnerable populations unit) in the Department of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research of the World Health Organization. She has worked over 30 years in public health and global health policy, with a focus on women's health, sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and violence against women. She led WHO’s initial work on gender mainstreaming and on violence against women, including coordinating the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence and co-leading the first global and regional estimates on intimate partner violence and sexual violence against women. She has led or authored various WHO and other publications on integrating gender and health, women’s health, and violence against women and shaped global policy on these issues. She is a founder, past chair and now in the Leadership Council of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative and was Chair of the Independent Advisory Board of DFID’s research initiative, ‘What Works to prevent violence against women and girls?’. She is a physician from Mexico with an MSc in Community Medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

Eva Mwai is the Regional Director for East Africa at North Star Alliance. She has worked as a leader and manager in the NGO sector for more than 20 years. She has managed a wide range of programmes in both rural and urban set-ups. As the Regional Director for East Africa, Eva provides strategic direction and leadership. Since the early years of her career, Eva has been a strong advocate for deserving populations. She has studied social work, management, and is currently pursuing a course in sustainable human development. Before joining NSA Eva worked as CEO for St. John Ambulance and Programme Manager for Plan International. Eva is passionate about the last mile health and is an advocate for the health rights of girls and women. She strongly believes that local communities have the capability of designing and implementing programmes which have a positive impact on their lives. Among the programmes she oversees are Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) and prevention of Gender Based Violence. She promotes gender equality, led her team to develop the gender strategy for her organisation, and is in the process of developing the gender policy. She was awarded the African Woman in Supply Chain Leadership Award in 2018 by Pamela Steele Associates Limited, an organisation which promotes gender equality in supply chain leadership.

Giselle Carino is the CEO for IPPFWHR, a progressive feminist ecosystem of 26 and growing local partner organizations largely from the global South, who share a common mission: to ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care; eliminate violence against women, girls, and gender-diverse people; provide sex education; and fight for sexual and reproductive justice by dismantling structural sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. A political scientist and activist from Argentina, high impact leader and change maker, Giselle’s mission to mobilize change in gender equality across the global South is evidenced in her twenty-year commitment meeting the complex intersecting needs of women and girls of all ages, sectors, and political affiliations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Under her leadership, IPPFWHR has played a key role in championing critical policy reforms across Latin America and the Caribbean and at the U.N, and in developing innovative business models that integrate advocacy, service provision, education and research that expand access to sexual and reproductive health programs for women, girls, and gender-diverse people who need them the most. A native from the Argentinian countryside, Giselle grew up during a period of military dictatorship and violence that sparked her commitment to social justice and the feminist movement. Giselle co-founded the Latin American Consortium Against Unsafe Abortion, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Women’s Link Worldwide and Catholics for the Right to Decide/Mexico. Giselle is a regular columnist with El Pais in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

Khara Jabola-Carolus is the Executive Director of the Hawaiʻi State Commission on the Status of Women, a feminist government agency in the United States dedicated to the liberation of women and non-binary people. She led Hawai`i to become the first and only state in the USA to allow any person with a prostitution record to vacate their conviction — except for sex buyers and pimps. Khara is the only millennial to direct a statewide government agency in Hawaiʻi. Previously, she led the Hawaiʻi Coalition for Immigrant Rights where she passed landmark legislation that extended driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. She earned her Juris Doctor from the University of Hawaiʻi with a specialization in Native Hawaiian law and has performed fellowships at the United States Senate, Hawaiʻi Supreme Court, and Committee to Protect Journalists. Her family is from Laguna, Philippines.

Dr. Mabel Bianco has been a leading advocate for women’s rights in Argentina and worldwide for four decades. She is the founder and director of FEIM, Foundation for Studies and Research on Women, based in Buenos Aires since 1989. She is an MD, MPH and Epidemiologist, an expert on women and girls rights, and she advises governments and NGOs on women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Dr. Bianco is a pioneer in studying women and HIV, advanced prevention efforts, and was chief of the HIV Unit in Argentina’s Ministry of Health from 2000 to 2001. In 2006, she received the Red Ribbon Award. She has advocated in Argentina , the region and globally for SRHR, including access to safe abortion. Dr. Bianco is the founder and director of the Latin-American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network, and she participated in the creation and leadership of coalitions such as HERA (Health, Empowerment, Rights, and Accountability), and the Women Won't Wait (WWW) Campaign - End HIV and Violence Against Women NOW. She was recognized as “one of the most inspiring individuals delivering for girls and women” by Women Deliver in 2011, and received the 150 Women Who Shake the World Award by Newsweek in 2011. In 2012, she was elected member of the Civil Society Advisory Group of the LAC Regional Office of UN Women. In 2017, she was designated Woman of Distinction of the Year by the Committee of NGOs CSW New York. In 2019, she was recognized as one of the 100 most influential women by the BBC, and since 2019, she has been part of the Generation Equality Forum.

Priscilla Ikos Usiobaifo is the Founder and Executive Director of BraveHeart Initiative for Youth & Women (BHI), a feminist organisation advancing young people’s sexual and reproductive health and promoting women’s rights in Nigeria. Priscilla proudly identifies as an African feminist activist and has institutionalized her feminist ideologies at BraveHeart Initiative where she raises younger generation of feminist advocates and activists. She advocates for community system strengthening and has made remarkable impact in young people’s SRHR Programming especially in rural communities. Priscilla leads advocacy for gender related laws, and she is one of the most committed voice on the issue of rape in Nigeria. She has intervened in over 500 cases of sexual violence and successfully facilitated court convictions of 17 Sex Offenders in Edo State, Nigeria. Priscilla is a Fellow of the ARSRC – Sexuality Leadership Development Fellowship and an Alumni of the CREA Sexuality, Gender & Rights Institute. She is a member of the National Technical Advisory Working Group on Adolescent Health & Development and currently chairs the Service Providers Accountability Resource Committee (SPARC) in Edo State, Nigeria. She was recently celebrated by the British Council in Nigeria for challenging the status quo and progressing women’s rights in her community and was branded as an Orange Champion by the US Embassy Nigeria. Priscilla was the 2019 recipient of Yemisi Ransome Kuti (YRK) Leadership Award; a 2019 nominee of the FP1 20 Under 40 Award; and a recipient of the Annual Nigerian Youth Leadership Award.

Rena Greifinger is an award-winning social entrepreneur, philanthropy leader, and advocate for women and girls. She currently leads Experiential Philanthropy at Population Services International (PSI) and is Managing Director of the Maverick Collective by PSI, a community of women philanthropists making catalytic investments in health and reproductive rights to elevate women and girls everywhere. Maverick Collective was founded by Melinda Gates, Her Royal Highness the Crown Princess of Norway and PSI to mobilize more resources for gender equality while igniting well-resourced women to change the way philanthropy is done, starting with their own transformation. In 2018, Rena founded Maverick Next, an immersive two-year fellowship for emerging women leaders to actively participate in philanthropy and become informed advocates, bold leaders and strategic investors in social impact. As PSI's Global Youth & Girls Advisor for five years, she led the organization's work in design-thinking and private sector approaches to adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Rena also founded Next Step’s One Love Project, an award-winning program that builds leadership, life-skills and mentoring support for young people living with HIV in the U.S. She sits on the boards of Next Step and Mamamtoto Village, a community based maternal health organization serving Black womxn in Washington D.C. She is a recipient of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Albert Schweitzer Award, Sara’s Wish Foundation’s Global Humanitarian Award and was named one of Apolitical’s Top 100 Influencers in Gender Policy in 2021. Rena holds a Master’s of Science from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Rupsa Mallik is responsible for developing and implementing CREA’s strategic initiatives and program in India, South Asia region and at the global level. CREA is a feminist international human rights organization based in the Global South and led by women from the Global South. CREA’s work draws upon the inherent value of a rights-based approach to sexuality and gender equality. Rupsa has over two decades experience in advocating for sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender equity and justice in various capacities. Previously, she has worked with the National Foundation for India, Centre for Health and Gender Equity in the US and South Asia Regional Office of the International Planned Parenthood Federation among others. Rupsa’s work in recent years has been to advance CREA’s work on critical SRHR issues that continue to remain significant faultlines that divide movements such as the issue of disability and abortion and sex selection and abortion amongst other issues. In addition, her work has served to critically engage on other intersections such as sexual and gender diversity, criminalisation and denial of consent and legal capacity as part of a more expansive framework through which to advance issues of bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Rupsa holds a Master’s degree in Women and Development from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, the Netherlands.

Sarah Craven, a policy advocate and attorney with expertise in sexual and reproductive health and rights, currently serves as the Director of the Washington Office of UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. In this leadership role, Sarah advocates for UNFPA's mandate which envisions a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person can live to their full potential. Sarah has led advocacy and communication campaigns addressing a wide range of issues impacting the health, rights and dignity of women and girls including addressing gender-based violence in humanitarian settings, ending harmful practices including FGM and child marriage and preventing maternal mortalitiy and morbidities including obstetric fistula and uterine prolapse. Prior to her work at UNFPA, she held positions at the U.S. Department of State and on the legislative staff to U.S. Senators Tim Wirth of Colorado and Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii. She served as a policy advisor to the CEDPA grassroots women's network during the 1994 International Conference on Population and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. She is a founding board member of Kakenya's Dream, an innovative girl's leadership school in Western Kenya. Sarah holds a B.A. from Macalester College, a M.Phil from Cambridge University (UK) and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar. She is the proud mother of Anna, Jack and Grace and two rescue beagles Daisy and Eddie.

Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health at its forty-fourth session in July 2020. She is a medical doctor in practice at DISA clinic and has expertise advocating for universal health access, HIV care, youth friendly services and family planning. Tlaleng is a former Commissioner at the Commission for Gender Equality in South Africa and a current member of the boards of Safe Abortion Action Fund, Global Advisory Board for Sexual Health and Wellbeing, Accountability International, and Soul City Institute for Social Justice. She has experience in advocacy training for healthcare professionals and her areas of focus have been on gender equality, policy, maternal and neonatal health, universal health access, post violence care, menstrual health, and HIV management. Tlaleng has been advisor to the Technical Committee for the National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Framework Strategy in South Africa, successfully mobilizing across movements working on issues of children and adolescents, persons with disabilities, migrants and persons living with HIV/AIDS. She also briefed the United States Senate congressional staff on the impact of the Global Gag Rule globally and in the region. She has worked as a first responder on matters of gender-based violence, and has been an expert witness in court, leaning on the work of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to defend the rights of the abused with an interest to ensure access to post-violence care. She is an author of a bestselling book "Dr T: A Guide to Sexual Health and Pleasure", a broadcaster and a multi-award winning doctor.

Aleta Baun, an indigenous Mollo, was born to a family of farmers. Having lost her mother at a young age, she was raised by other women and elders in the village who taught her to respect the environment as a source of spiritual identity and livelihood. As an individual whose life was shaped by the values of these elders, Baun naturally came into a leadership role in her community, sharing her traditional knowledge and eventually becoming known as “Mama Aleta.” When mining companies started clearing the forests and cutting out marble from the mountains, she understood that their activities were a threat to the Mollo people’s rights to their territory—and their survival. Mama Aleta’s work made her a target for the mining interests and local authorities, who put a price on her head. After surviving a particularly close assassination attempt, she went into hiding in the forest with her baby. Several other villagers were repeatedly arrested and badly beaten. Despite the violent intimidation, Mama Aleta grew the movement to include hundreds of villagers. It culminated in a weaving occupation, during which 150 women spent a year sitting on the marble rocks at the mining site, quietly weaving their traditional cloth in protest. Because women were traditionally responsible for foraging food, dye, and medicine from the mountains, it was important for them to lead the campaign. In the face of the villagers’ peaceful and sustained presence, marble mining became an increasingly untenable endeavor for the companies involved. Public awareness of the weaving occupation was growing, and Indonesian government officials took notice. By 2010, the mining companies, reacting to the pressure, halted mining at all four sites within the Mollo territories and abandoned their operations. Mama Aleta is now working with communities across West Timor to map their traditional forests. The effort is a preemptive strategy to establish indigenous territorial rights and protect their land from future mining projects and threats from commercial agriculture and oil and gas development. She’s also leading the way to create economic opportunities for the villagers through sustainable farming and enterprises that generate income from weaving and other activities. [Text and Image Credit: The Goldman Environmental Prize]

Angie Dazé is a Senior Policy Advisor and the Gender Equality Lead for the Resilience team at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), an award-winning independent think tank working to create a world where people and the planet thrive. Angie has been working at the nexus of gender and climate change for more than 15 years. Her experience spans from conducting gender-responsive vulnerability assessments at the community level to providing technical support to national governments on integrating gender equality and social inclusion in adaptation planning. She has authored a number of research and guidance documents, including global assessments of progress on gender-responsive adaptation planning and analysis of the linkages between sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and climate resilience. Angie represents IISD in the Women and Gender Constituency under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and collaborates with a range of UN agencies, governments, and NGOs to advance gender-responsive climate action. Previously, she worked for CARE International and for the Canadian government.

Bridget Burns is a feminist, environmental activist & the Director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), a global advocacy organization working at the intersections of gender equality and environmental justice. For over a decade, she has been focused on integrating gender equality into climate change policy and decision-making at global and national levels. In her work at the international policy level, she has facilitated travel support and capacity building for over 250 women from the Global South to participate as part of their national delegations in UNFCCC meetings and intersessionals, under WEDO's flagship Women Delegates Fund (WDF) programme. In addition, Bridget serves as the co-Focal Point of the Women and Gender Constituency, which supports the political participation of women’s rights advocates into the UN climate change process. Through synergies with key civil society activists, this work has supported the integration of gender equality language across 70 programs and decisions of the UNFCCC. Bridget also sits on the Steering Committee of the Feminist Green New Deal Coalition, as well as the Coalition for a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States.

Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican citizen and was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010 - 2016. During her tenure, Ms. Figueres brought together national and sub-national governments, corporations and activists, women’s groups, scientists and spiritual communities, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly deliver the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Under this Agreement, 195 sovereign governments decided on a collaborative path to limit future global warming to well below 2°C, and strive for 1.5°C in order to protect the most vulnerable in every nation. For this achievement, Ms. Figueres has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy, for which she has received multiple awards. Since then Ms. Figueres has continued to foster rapid action on climate change, She is the co-author of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (Penguin Random House 2019) and co-host of the podcast Outrage and Optimism. She sits on the Board of ACCIONA and Impossible Foods. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the London School of Economics, and has been awarded multiple honorary doctorate degrees from academic institutions such as Yale, University of Massachusetts, Georgetown and University of Edinburgh. After decades of living and working abroad, she has recently moved back to her beloved Costa Rica. She has two fantastic daughters, Naima and Yihana, fountains of much joy. [Image Credit: Jimena Mateo]

Clare Church (she/her) is a researcher and advocate based in both Canada and the UK. In 2020, her work—as part of the International Institute for Sustainable Development—involved providing research and recommendations for governments seeking to integrate gender considerations into their climate change policies. She also supported the development of material for private sector actors, by providing information on how to incorporate gender into their climate action. Additionally, she supported Angie Dazé by contributing to foundational research regarding the connections between climate change and sexual and reproductive health rights. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at Aberystwyth University, where her research focuses on the role of women in wartime, highlighting especially their capacity for nonviolence, peacebuilding, and resistance. She continues to actively advocate for women’s rights, publishing articles and speaking at international events and conferences on the subject. In 2018, Clare was named one of Canada’s Top 30 Under 30 in Sustainability by Corporate Knights Magazine.

Dr. Fatima Denton is an accomplished senior manager in the UN system, respected across the research and implementation branches of the organization. She has in-depth knowledge of natural resource management, and extensive experience of research and policy development, in the African region. Prior to joining UNU-INRA, Dr. Denton worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), based in Addis Ababa from 2012. Her research has focused on climate change adaptation looking at resilience systems – sectors such as agriculture, water and energy, principally in Africa. She has also worked at the intersections between adaptation and mitigation, gender and development and energy poverty and development in Africa; and examined different types of renewable energy transformations in Africa. Since 2012, her research has extended to climate mitigation looking principally at green economy and decarbonization strategies in Africa especially with regard to current efforts on greening the value chains vis-a-vis Africa’s industrialisation ambitions. She has an established track record in building programmes on the interrelationships between adaptation and mitigation in Africa, implications for stranded hydrocarbon assets and intersections between climate change, food security and trade towards green transitions. In the early 2000s, she wrote one of the first articles on gender and climate change – in which she argued climate vulnerability is not gender neutral and posited that women faced a heightened sense of vulnerability given their high incidence of poverty and reliance on climate sensitive sectors such as agriculture. Dr. Denton is a Lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on climate change and land, a Lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III, and was previously a Lead author for the Working Group II Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports and for the IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy and Climate Change Mitigation. She has served on numerous scientific committees and boards. She is currently serving in the advisory committee and scientific board of Future Earth and is also a Commissioner Global Economic Transformation (CGET) linked to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). [Image Credit: United Nations University]

Hindou Oumar Ibrahim, an environmental activist and member of Chad’s pastoralist Mbororo community, began advocating for Indigenous rights and environmental protection at age 16, founding the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT) to introduce new income revenue activities for women and collaborative tools, such as 3D participatory mapping to build sustainable ecosystems management and reduction of nature-based resource conflicts. Her vision is to grow support for both traditional knowledge and science to improve resilience to climate change especially for rural communities. She is a member of the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) and served as co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change during the historic UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris. She is dedicated to the protection of all Indigenous peoples, from the Congo to the Arctic, and the value of their knowledge in the fight against climate change. She advances environmental protection for Indigenous peoples by participating in international policy dialogues held around the three Rio Conventions; Climate Change (UNFCCC), Biodiversity (CBD), and Desertification (UNCCD) pressuring governments to recognize land rights of Indigenous peoples and advance their solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation. Ibrahim’s work with indigenous communities at the local and global level has achieved broad recognition and support including, the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award;, the 2020 Refugee International’s Refugees International Holbrooke Award; the Daniel Mitterrand Prize; appointment as a UN SDG Advocate, Conservation International Board Member and Lui-Walton Senior Fellow; Member of the EAT Advisory Board; named Ambassador of the EDEN Project; and National Geographic Explorer. She was recognized by BBC as a top 100 women leader and by TIME's Women Leaders in Climate Change. A building was named in her honor through Riverdale Country School's 2021 Jolli Humanitarian Award. Her TED talk on Indigenous knowledge meets science to solve climate change has surpassed more than 1 million views.

Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is an author, strategist, and teacher working to heal the planet we call home. Her books on climate include the bestselling anthology All We Can Save, The Drawdown Review, the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, and Between God & Green. Dr. Wilkinson co-founded and leads The All We Can Save Project with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, nurturing the feminist climate renaissance, and she co-hosts the podcast A Matter of Degrees, telling stories for the climate curious with Dr. Leah Stokes. Previously, Dr. Wilkinson was the principal writer and editor-in-chief at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. She speaks widely, including at National Geographic, Skoll World Forum, and the United Nations, and her TED Talk on climate and gender equality has more than 1.9 million views. She serves on the boards of the Doc Society, Chattahoochee Now, and Wild Ark and advises numerous climate-focused initiatives. A homegrown Atlantan, Dr. Wilkinson holds a doctorate in geography and environment from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA in religion from Sewanee, where she is now a visiting professor. In 2019, Planned Parenthood Southeast recognized Dr. Wilkinson as a “legend in the making,” and Time magazine named her one of 15 “women who will save the world.” She is happiest on a mountain or a horse. [Image Credit: Ben Brinker]

Najat Aoun Saliba is a Professor in Chemistry at the American University of Beirut. Saliba leads several locally relevant and globally important inhalable and atmospheric aerosol chemistry and climate change projects. Currently, she concentrates on community-led and community-driven environmental projects that are based on the co-production of knowledge for finding the most suited solutions to local challenges. She is the co-founder and executive director of Khaddit Beirut and the Director and Founder of the Environment Academy (EA). In 2019, she received the L’Oreal-UNESCO International Award for Women in Science, the National Order of the Cedar from the President of the Lebanese Republic, the Honorary Cedar Shield from the Speaker of the Parliament of Lebanon and the Paul Harris Fellow Pin from the Rotary Club Beirut Cedars. In 2019 she was voted among the top 100 most influential women by the BBC, and in 2016 she received the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research Award in the Environmental Category.

Natalie Unterstell is a Brazil native on a mission to build a climate-resilient and deforestation-free world. Having lived and worked in the Amazon rainforest, she has worked closely with indigenous peoples as well as policymakers, activists and business leaders. She served as the Head of Sustainable Development for the Brazilian Presidency, the Head of the Amazonas State' Climate Change Center and as one of Brazil's negotiators at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. She is the founder of multiple policy think tanks and advocacy groups focused on climate leadership, gender equality and environmental stewardship, and she serves as advisor to various initiatives, including the Women's League for the Ocean. In 2018, she was selected for the largest all-female expedition to Antarctica, Homeward Bound, where she reaffirmed her commitment to advance climate action. Natalie has a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University, and a Bachelor in Business Administration from Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV).

Stella Funsani Gama is a Forestry Advisor in the Ministry of Forestry and Natural Resources, Malawi. She has been a forest resources management specialist for over twenty years with a focus on participatory methodologies, forest governance and institutions, stakeholder engagement and forest administration. Stella has a strong passion for enhancing women's effective participation in climate and environment diplomacy. She has eight years' experience working on climate change diplomacy at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and advocating for women's empowerment, gender balance in Rio Conventions bodies, gender responsive climate policies, and technology development and transfer. She is a UNFCCC negotiator for Malawi and the Least Developing Countries Group. Stella has served as a Technology Executive Committee member and vice chair, and is currently Rapporteur for the Subsidiary Body on Scientific and Technological Advice at the UNFCCC.

Tracy Kajumba is a principal Researcher and Team leader at IIED’s Climate Change Group. She has over 20 years’ experience of development research, programme management, policy influencing and has worked on diverse development programmes with gender equality and social justice as key highlights of her career interest. Before IIED, Tracy worked with the Ireland Department of Foreign Affairs as a senior regional advisor for climate change and development for Sub Saharan Africa, country programme lead with the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance, Care International in Uganda as a gender and climate change advisor, earlier, she worked with the Government of Uganda in public administration as a senior assistant Town clerk. Gender equality and social justice has framed much of Tracy’s career. She engages with different global panels on gender and climate justice outcomes. At IIED, she leads a team focusing on gender and climate justice. She worked on strengthening climate and gender linkages with the Government of Ireland and has worked with Governments in Africa to integrate gender equality in climate policies and programmes. She has supported CSOs in Africa through capacity development and developing gender policies. Tracy has also worked with communities to understand gendered impacts of climate and development and design tools that include the excluded voices of women, girls, and other socially, economically, and politically excluded groups. She has also been part of designing adaptation MEL systems to address issues of gender, rights, equity, and justice for better outcomes for women, girls, and other excluded groups.

Deborah De Mari is the founder and CEO of Força Meninas (Go Girls), which has already reached more than 43,000 girls across Brazil since 2016. Força Meninas is an educational startup focused on girls aged 6-19 years old, their parents and their educators. They aim to empower girls to lead the future and achieve gender equality through the development of social, emotional skills, and leadership skills. They do this through enabling the full and effective participation of these girls in areas with low female representation, such as Science, Finance and Technology. She was finalist of the MIT Solve Challenge 2020, and she was selected as one of the world's 104 most relevant community leaders by Facebook in 2018. As a driving force in Força Meninas, Deborah has been handpicking high achieving girls to prepare them to be leaders and role models to younger ones. In 2018, she created an award named Change the World Like a Girl, with the goal to give voice to young girls in Brazil and expose their initiative to solve everyday problems. Three years later, in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, it became the first online community to connect high potential young women to teen girls, enabling them to find a safe place to connect, develop skills and consider careers with the most prominent future opportunities. Thyy amplify their impact through partnerships with companies like Uber, ArcelorMittal, Facebook, Original Bank, and Canada's Counsel in Brazil. A pioneer and a reputed speaker, Deborah challenges the stereotype that STEM careers are not for women. She works hard to change girls' and parents' minds, as well as enabling companies to make long-term commitments. She is eager to find paths to accelerate gender equality and disrupt the inequality cycle for girls. Deborah wants to be remembered as a community leader who will change the world like a girl.

Elizabeth (Liz) Kellison works with organizations to define and implement solutions to alleviate extreme poverty and gender inequality. She creates focused strategies and programmes that target low-income women, using multi-dimensional approaches that work to transform harmful social norms. She also helps organizations apply a gender lens to their mission and work. A seasoned leader with experience in philanthropy, private and nonprofit sectors, Liz has deep practical and strategic experience in gender equality and digital financial services, as well as digital social protection. She spent 11 years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she developed the Financial Services for the Poor team's first gender strategy, resulting in a Women's Economic Empowerment program focused on digitizing cash transfers to low-income women. Prior to joining the foundation, Liz was instrumental in launching and managing WebJunction.org, a learning portal for public library staff run by OCLC, the world's largest nonprofit library cooperative. Liz earned a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Williams College, and an MA in Slavic Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill, and struggles to speak Russian as well as she used to.

Emily Courey Pryor is a social impact executive and gender equality advocate. She is the founding Executive Director of Data2X, a civil society organization that works to eliminate gender bias from the world’s major data sources and drive use of that data to improve the lives of women and girls. Data2X works with partners – UN agencies, governments, civil society, academia, and the private sector – to improve gender data and its use for better, smarter decision making. In addition to a focus on gender equality, she has a passion for and experience working in global health, international disaster response, and peace and security. Emily took a running start in her career at the American Red Cross, managed Gilead Sciences’ corporate philanthropy, and has built and led a variety of start-ups, including the UN Foundation’s initiative on Women’s Economic Empowerment and the Girl Up campaign. She was also a founding investor in a utility-scale solar energy company. Emily received her MPH from the University of Michigan and BA from the University of Florida. She lives in Nashville with her husband and children.

Jac sm Kee is a feminist activist working on the intersections of internet technologies, expression, culture, sexuality and social justice. Her activism includes sexuality and gender justice, feminist movement building in a digital age, internet governance, digital rights, open culture and epistemic justice. She is located within these movements at hyper-local, networked and global levels, and is based in Malaysia. Jac co-founded several award winning initiatives and projects, including the Take Back the Tech! collaborative global campaign and theFeminist Principles of the Internet. Jac played a key role in driving the work on feminism and tech while at the Association for Progressive Communications, and has served as a civil society representative in the global Internet Governance Forum, Multistakeholder Advisory Group – putting gender as one of the forum’s main thematic issues for the first time during their term. Jac was awarded the Stieg Larsson award in 2017 for pioneering work on online gender-based violence and feminist internet. Jac also served as board member and advisor to a number of of key feminist organisations including AWID, CREA, Mamacash and Women’s Fund Asia. Jac is also a founding member of the Malaysia Design Archive (MDA) – an independent visual culture community archival centre that focusses on open culture, engagement and participatory history through design. Jac is currently making into reality with co-dreamers – Numun Fund – the first dedicated fund for feminist tech rooted in the expansive mycelium network of the Larger World (aka Global South). [Image Credit: illustration by madmeg]

Joana Varon is Brazilian, with Colombian ancestry and a nomad heart. She is a feminist researcher and activist focused on bringing decolonial Latin American perspectives in the search of feminist techno-political frameworks for shaping the development, deployment and usages of technologies. As it is a collective search, she is the Founder Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights, a women-run organization working to expose and redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities. Believing in art, creativity and coding as tools for revolutions, she is a co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between activism, arts and technologies, such as transfeministech.org, museamami.org, chupadados.com, #SaferSisters, Safer Nudes, From Devices to Bodies, protestos.org, Net of Rights and freenetfilm.org. A former Mozilla Media Fellow, Joana is currently a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. She is also affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Dr. Kalpana Viswanath is a researcher and practitioner on gender inclusive urbanisation and women’s safety. She is the co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, a social enterprise that uses technology and data to advocate for safe urban spaces for women and others. Safetipin was started in 2013 and has worked with city and municipal governments in more than 25 cities in India and globally. Prior to this, she headed the Safe Delhi program for Jagori, a well-known feminist organization in India and worked closely with Delhi government since 2009 to help build programs to address women’s safety. She is a member of the Women’s Safety Committee of Delhi government and the mission on Safe City Indicators of the Indian Bureau of Police Research and Development. She has worked as a consultant with UN Women and UN Habitat on issues of gender and urban safety and has led research studies on violence against women in public spaces in several cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. She led a multi country action research on gender inclusive cities under the UN Trust Fund to End VAW. She is a member of the Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI) at UN Habitat, Board member of SLOCAT (a global network on sustainable mobility), the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime (ICPC), and the Chair of Jagori. She has published widely in newspapers, magazines and journals and has co-edited a book on Building Gender Inclusive Cities. She wrote a weekly column on inclusive urban spaces for Hindustan Times.

Lucina Di Meco is a gender equality expert and women’s rights advocate. She’s the author of #ShePersisted: Women, Politics & Power in the New Media World, a study investigating the relationship between women in politics and social media in 30 countries. Her work has been featured on Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Politico, El Pais, The Hill and Voice of America, among others. Lucina is the co-founder of #ShePersisted Global, an initiative tackling gendered disinformation and online attacks against women in politics, by enhancing research and understanding of gendered disinformation campaigns at works; connecting a network of women leaders globally, and providing them with the tools they need to respond to online attacks, and advance regulatory solutions. Lucina has written on gendered disinformation and social media harms for The Brookings Institution, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Council of Foreign Relations, The National Endowment for Democracy, Ms. Magazine and The Women's Media Center, among others. Throughout her career, Lucina has worked with a wide range of international actors promoting women's rights in the Global South, including Vital Voices, The Wilson Center, International IDEA, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, UNDP and UN Women. Lucina currently serves as Senior Director for Gender Equality at Room to Read, an international nonprofit working to end gender inequality through education; co-founder of The Gender Breakfast, a network of 150+ gender professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Advisory Board Member of FundHer, an organization working to elect progressive women to State legislatures.

Mariana Santos is a Portuguese girl who wants to change the world, and is working on it right now. She is the Founder and CEO at Chicas Poderosas, a non-profit organization that aims to bring more women into technology, which she started in Latin America back in 2013 while she was an ICFJ fellow. Today, she runs it full time with her team and a board of directors, who are experts in the different areas of journalism, entrepreneurship, business, innovation and design thinking. She is a former infographics editor at the Olympic Committee Rio 2016, former Director of Interactive and Animation at Fusion Media. Mariana was the Knight Innovation Chair at Florida International University in 2015-16; a JSK Knight fellow at Stanford University in 2015; and a Knight International Journalism Fellow 2013-14, working all across Latin America in major newsrooms and with independent journalists. She is a visual storyteller, who did groundbreaking work as a member of the interactive team at The Guardian in London. A trained animator, she pioneered the newsroom’s use of motion graphics to make data stories more compelling. She leads design thinking workshops to increase multidisciplinary approach to storytelling, and she is a leader in community transformation via digital training.

Marisa Miodosky is Argentine, and grew up in the province of San Juan. She studied Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires, and later won the Fulbright scholarship and obtained her Masters Degree in Sustainable International Development from the Heller School for Social Policy, at Brandeis University, in the United States. Marisa has worked for more than twenty years on social development issues, such as urban and rural poverty, youth, and migrations in civil society organizations and international organizations, such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Bank, and the Foreign Office. Since 2016, she has worked in the government of the City of Buenos Aires, where she coordinated the City Gender Equality Strategy 2018-2020. In that role, she was in charge of mainstreaming a gender perspective into the City's administration through the use of the Gender Indicator System, which she set up together with colleagues. She has participated in the design and implementation of 12 evidence based policies and 7 laws aiming at reducing the gender gaps in the labor market, enhancing women's participation in the public space, and eliminating gender based violence. For that work, she and her team were awarded with the 2019 Best International Civil Service Award promoting Equality by Apolitical. She has authored and coordinated several publications on public policies and gender equality. She teaches about gender mainstreaming in the public sector at Di Tella University and is part of the 2020 mentors group at the Three Dot Dash Program of We Are Family Foundation.

Roberta Solis is the Judicial Integrity Team Leader at the Global Programme for the Implementation of the Doha Declaration of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – UNODC, which is the Secretariat of the Global Judicial Integrity Network (www.unodc.org/ji), a platform “of judges and for judges” to strengthen judicial integrity and prevent corruption within the judicial system. The initiative has developed new international standards and resources on, for example, judges’ use of social media and gender-related issues and is currently working on other groundbreaking areas, such as the use of artificial intelligence by judiciaries, including its gender implications. Ms. Solis holds a bachelor’s degree in Law from the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a postgraduate degree in International Relations from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Before joining UNODC, Ms. Solis was a career Federal Attorney in Brazil since 2005 and worked for eight years in Brazil’s Anti-Corruption Agency, where she held the position of Chief International Affairs Advisor. During this time, Ms. Solis was involved in various national and international activities, and participated in the establishment of different international initiatives, such as the negotiations of the Implementation Review Mechanism of the United Nations Convention against Corruption – UNCAC, and the creation of the Open Government Partnership – OGP and of the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency - GIFT. From 2012 to 2016, Ms. Solis was the Chair of the Criteria and Standards Sub-Committee of the Open Government Partnership.

Dr. Rose M. Mutiso is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Mawazo Institute, which supports the next generation of female scholars and thought leaders in East Africa, and promotes public engagement with research. She is also the Research Director of the Energy for Growth Hub, working with global experts to find solutions for energy deficits in developing countries. Rose has worked extensively as a researcher and practitioner focused on technology and policy dimensions of energy, environment and innovation issues globally. Most recently, her work has focused on power sector issues in Africa, particularly the links between renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy poverty. She is a Materials Scientist by training with research experience in the fields of nanotechnology and polymer physics. Rose is passionate about harnessing science & technology to improve lives, and elevating women to positions of leadership and influence in African society. She earned her BA and BE in Engineering Sciences with a concentration in Materials Science from Dartmouth College, and her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Saniye Gülser Corat served as Director for Gender Equality at UNESCO (September 2004-August 2020). She published the landmark 2019 study “I’d Blush if I Could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills in Education”, which found inadvertent gender bias in the most popular artificial intelligence tools. This report sparked a global conversation with the technology sector, culminating in a keynote address at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon. She published UNESCO’s follow-up research in August 2020. “Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality” is based on a dialogue with experts from the private sector and proposes elements for a framework on gender equality and AI for further consideration amongst various stakeholders. The Digital Future Society named Gülser one of the top ten women leaders in technology for 2020. In December 2020, she was named the Global Leader in Technology by the Women in Tech global movement. At UNESCO, Gülser launched special programs for girls’ secondary education, girls’ education in STEM, digital gender gap, and the advancement of women in science. She led organizational change at UNESCO, by having gender equality recognized as a global priority for the organization in 2007, and achieving gender parity among senior leadership in 2017 that stood at a mere 9% in 2004. Before UNESCO, Gülser was the CEO of a global development consulting company and led development projects in over 30 countries. She holds graduate degrees from Carleton University, Canada and College of Europe, Belgium and postgraduate certificates from the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School.

Alexandra Garita is a feminist activist committed to advancing women’s and LBT persons’ human’s rights. She has protested, written, and advocated for bodily autonomy, sexual and reproductive health and rights, climate justice and gender equality throughout her life. Alex is currently the Executive Director of Prospera INWF, an international network of women's funds committed to resourcing women, girls and trans people’s organizations, activists, movements, and their communities around the world. Before becoming the Executive Director, Alex served as Deputy Director for three years. While at Prospera, Alex is focused on influencing funding flows to become more democratic and just. Previously, Alex was in senior leadership positions in various Mexican feminist organizations. She was also the founder and first Executive Coordinator of Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Justice (RESURJ) for five years. Prior, Alex worked as Senior Program Officer, International Policy, with the International Women’s Health Coalition and led the international advocacy program at IPPF/Western Hemisphere Region. Alex also formed part of Decidir (Choice: Youth Coalition for Sexual Citizenship) where she advocated for young people’s rights to safe and legal abortion in Mexico City prior to the liberalization of the law. Alex has also worked at the Mexican Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and with the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Reproductive Health Matters and holds a B.A. in International Relations from Boston University and an M.A. in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from Essex University.

Danielle Bousquet is the President of France's largest network of agencies informing women of their rights, Federation Nationale des Centres d'Information pour les droits des Femmes et des Familles (FNCIDFF). She is the former président of the French High Council for Gender Equality (HCEFH) and a family planning activist. Ms Bousquet was a member of the National Assembly of France from 1997 to 2012, representing the first constituency of the Côtes-d'Armor Department as a member of the Socialist Party.

Editar Adhiambo Ochieng is an unapologetic and proud feminist that champions for women's rights and believes that every right under the law should be enjoyed by each one equally. She is the founder of the Feminist for Peace, Rights and Justice Center located in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. Editar is an intersectional feminist, and her goal is a society that "enables the full development, safety, access equal rights, fair justice and self-actualization of young women." Her centre aims to build leadership among young women, serving as a multi-generational organizing and networking platform. She encourages women to tell their stories, raising awareness and support by publicizing the commonality of these experiences. The centre serves as a support network for vulnerable women, such as those leaving abusive relationships. Editar has continually advocated for the realization of Women’s and Girls’ Rights, as well as addressing issues around gender-based violence and its prevention before and during COVID-19 pandemic. She has championed the inclusion of women in peace and security plans that aim to promote peace in the once crime-ridden community by pushing for the implementation of UN Resolution 1325. Editar's voice on gender equality can never be stopped. She believes that championing for gender equality in all spaces will accelerate gender parity and inclusion and to reach sustainable development goals. She also urges people globally to be gender-sensitive and ensure women and girls are included meaningfully in matters of decision making and development as a way to bridge the existing gaps.

Farida Nabourema is a social activist, a writer, and a researcher from Togo. In 2014, Farida published a book titled “La Pression de oppression” (The Pressure of Oppression) in which she discussed different forms of oppression such as gender-based, cultural, and economic oppression and highlighted the need for women and youth to be politically engaged to defeat it. Farida is the coordinator of the Gender Equality Network for Small Arms Control (GENSAC). This cross-regional organization brings together disarmament, security, and gender justice experts in over 40 countries across Africa, the Western Balkans, Latin America, and the Caribbean to advance gender-responsive arms control and women leadership in the disarmament flora. Prior to that position, Farida served as the Togolese Civil League’s Executive Director and the Engagement and Collaboration Coordinator of African Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. Farida is a 2021 Jennings Randolph Senior Research Fellow at the U.S Institute of Peace, where she is researching gender-based repression in nonviolent movements across Africa. She is also a 2020 Freedom Fellow at the Human Rights Foundation and a 2021 Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative practitioner in residence at the Joseph Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she teaches a class as an adjunct professor. Farida’s work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, the Economist, and in 2018, she was listed as one of the Four Crusaders Keeping The Dream of Democracy Alive by Times Magazine. She was awarded The Young Female Advocate of the Year in 2017 by African Youth Awards and named one of the Most Influential African Women in 2019.

Françoise Moudouthe is a pan-African feminist with roots in Cameroon, fiercely committed to gender and social justice and passionate about fostering sisterhood within African feminist movements. Before joining the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF) as CEO in 2020, Françoise established Eyala, a bilingual (English-French) platform that amplifies the diverse voices and lived experiences of African feminists, and worked as an international consultant on advocacy, strategy development and movement-building for women’s rights in Africa. She also played an instrumental role in incubating Girls Not Brides, the global civil society partnership to end child marriage, and in spearheading its growth in Africa. Françoise is a Board member of the Malala Fund and Womankind Worldwide.

Fridah Githuku is a young woman leader, and an ardent champion of gender equality and women's rights. She is the Executive Director of GROOTS Kenya, a national movement of grassroots women and girls. GROOTS Kenya's mission is to facilitate grassroots women and girls’ effective engagement and influence in development. She has supported grassroots women, from rural and remote areas, to ascend to elected and appointed public decision making spaces. Fridah spends her time mentoring grassroots women to leadership, powering grassroots women feminists' organizing, and amplifying their voices. She is also a passionate promoter of the GROOTS Saving and Cooperative Society, a grassroots women-only financial institution.To promote economic justice for vulnerable groups, she has designed, with partners, a financial inclusion solution called Jasiri fund, which is a special loan fund targeting survivors of gender based violence during the Covid-19 pandemic in Kenya. She is the architect of the Grassroots Public Budget Academy, a platform that hones grassroots advocates' skills in public fiscal policy. A vocal champion for gender justice in land governance, she won the 2018 ONE Campaign Women of the Year award for advocating equal land rights for women and men. She was elected to represent the East Africa Region in the International Land Coalition Africa Steering Committee. Fridah is a member of the Inter-Agency Technical Committee on Gender Statistics by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and UN Women. She continues to advocate for evidence-driven development planning while pursuing increased production and use of gender data. She is a team leader in the development of a gender data dashboard for Kenya (www.genderdatakenya.org) to increase access to disaggregated data for advocates. She works closely with county governments to support development of gender responsive policies in the critical sectors of water, agriculture and climate change.

Jacinda Ardern is the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the member of parliament for Mount Albert. She is a member of the New Zealand Labour Party and describes herself as a social democrat and progressive. Her government has focused on fixing the housing crisis in New Zealand, as well as social inequality and child poverty. She has been praised for her handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand, which saw an early lockdown and limited spread compared to other Western economies. She has also sought to raise global awareness for issues such as the environment and human rights. [Image Credit: Beehive.govt.nz]

Judithe Registre is an established leader in social and economic justice and an unrelenting force for women and gender equality. Judithe has more than 18 years of experience living and working in countries across four continents to address structural and systemic injustices and advance girls’ education and women’s economic leadership. Through her work, Judithe has found women’s economic progress intrinsically linked to their leadership. As a force for good, Judithe finds success in using her unique strength in drawing connections between people, resources, and ideas. Judithe pays particular attention to girls’ equality, story equity, narrative justice, economic opportunities, and women business leadership. Judithe believes that everyone can be a force for good at the intersection of these connections. Judithe is a consummate innovator and entrepreneurial creative leader, which is demonstrated in her current work as Vice President of Programs at Girl Rising and co-founder and investor in Café Du Pain Bakery, an majority women-owned bakery business bridging food and culture that ensures women’s pivotal role in food. Judithe’s earlier work included leading a $12 million, Because I am a Girl, educational campaign for Plan International USA covering seven countries. She also led program and advocacy initiatives in the UK, DC, DRC and South Sudan with Women for Women International, impacting policy changes along with resource allocation for thousands of women to overcome the atrocities of rate and trauma. Judithe is currently a graduate student at Babson College School of Business working toward a master’s degree in advanced entrepreneurial leadership management.

Juliana Hernández De la Torre is a feminist, and an activist for peace and women's rights. She has worked for several years promoting and directing projects from civil society and the public sector for citizen participation, peace, memory, and women's rights, particularly in the regions most affected by internal armed conflict. She is currently co-coordinator of the Latin American Political Innovation Network and executive director of Artemisas, an organization that she co-founded with other women in 2016. It aims to promote a feminist, inclusive and redistributive democratic culture by creating solidarity and affective networks. Since 2020, she has coordinated the national campaign PARIDAD YA in Colombia, achieving the increase in women's participation in political parties' lists to 50% through collective advocacy and citizen pressure networks. In 2021, they aspire to achieve alternation and universality. Juliana is also co-coordinator and co-founder of the Political Advocacy network Nosotras Now, a network of women with a vocation for power that brings together 200 women from different regions in Colombia and where they can collectively generate strategies to reduce obstacles to participation in women's politics. She is co-founder and former co-director of the Extituto de Política Abierta, an organization focused on strengthening leadership and collective processes and designing tools and technologies for political and democratic innovation.

June Oscar is a proud Bunuba woman from the remote town of Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. She is a strong advocate for Indigenous Australian languages, social justice, women’s issues, and has worked tirelessly to reduce Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). June has held a raft of influential positions including Deputy Director of the Kimberley Land Council, chair of the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and the Kimberley Interpreting Service and Chief Investigator with WA’s Lililwan Project addressing FASD. She was appointed to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (1990) and was a winner of the 100 Women of Influence 2013 in the Social Enterprise and Not For Profit category. In 2015 June received the Menzies School of Health Research Medallion for her work with FASD. June has a Bachelor's Degree in Business from the University of Notre Dame, Broome, Western Australia, and is currently writing her PhD. She is a co-founder of the Yiramalay Wesley Studio School and is a community member of the Fitzroy Valley Futures Governing Committee. In February 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Edith Cowen University. June began her five year term as Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner on April 3, 2017. [Image Credit: Murray Harris Photography]

Kamla Bhasin has been actively engaged with issues related to development, gender, education, media and others since 1970. Currently, she works with Sangat – A Feminist Network as Adviser as well as JAGORI, A Women’s Resource and Training Centre and Jagori Rural Charitable Trust as an active member. She is the South Asia Coordinator of One Billion Rising, a global campaign to end violence against women and girls; Co-Chair of the worldwide network Peace Women Across the Globe; and member of South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR). Prior to this, she worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for 27 years. Her main work is at the South Asian level, and has included capacity building of young activists and networking amongst civil society organizations. She has also been conducting gender sensitization workshops for senior non-governmental organization leaders and managers, government officials, police personnel, and members of Parliament in various countries in South Asia. Kamla Bhasin has written and spoken extensively on gender, women’s empowerment, participatory and sustainable development, participatory training, media and communication. Most of her books are written for activists and development workers. She has also written a large number of songs and slogans for the women's movement, books for children, and has created many posters and banners for various people’s movements. She is committed to the creation of a peaceful, democratic and pluralist South Asia. She lives in New Delhi, India.

Laurie Adams is the Chief Executive Officer of Women for Women International (WfWI), a leading global organization that works with women survivors of war in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Iraq, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Sudan offering support, tools, and access to life-changing skills to move women and communities from crisis and poverty to stability and economic self-sufficiency. She is an innovative leader, strategist, and gender rights advocate with more than 30 years of experience in international development and human rights across Asia, the Americas, and Africa. Her professional history includes two decades of experience in Africa, including managing Oxfam’s country programs in three African regions. Laurie joined Oxfam after eight years at ActionAid International leading efforts from the South Africa headquarters to measure impact, strengthen learning, and build accountability for over 40 countries. A life-long women’s rights advocate, she has devoted her life to eradicating all forms of injustice – poverty, gender-based violence, inequality and racism, and other forms of human rights abuses. She shares impassioned stories of her experiences and her belief in the power of connecting women. Laurie has served as the chair of the founding board for The Other Foundation in South Africa, and as a director on the boards of The Forum for the Empowerment of Women in South Africa, and ActionAid Brazil. During her time at WfWI, she has spoken at the International Women’s Summit, SXSW, InterAction Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative University. She has also appeared on many outlets, including ABC, CBS, NBC, and BBC. Laurie holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy Management from the University of London, a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Women’s Rights from Dartmouth College, and completed the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School.

Leslie Archambeault is a human rights attorney and gender equality specialist with extensive technical and policy experience in the areas of international human rights and humanitarian law. Leslie is currently Director of Gender Policy and Advocacy at Save the Children where she leads on strategy development and execution of gender equality and girls’ rights advocacy across the US government’s foreign policy and assistance efforts, including legislation on girls’ civic and political participation, the Girls LEAD Act. She also co-chairs Save the Children’s federation-wide advocacy on ending child marriage and investing in girls. This includes: responding to girls’ needs resulting from COVID-19, addressing the GBV risks and experiences of adolescent girls in humanitarian settings, Generation Equality, and support for international, regional, and national level advocacy on girls. Leslie co-chairs the Washington, DC based Big Ideas for Women and Girls Coalition and Girls Not Brides USA. Previously, Leslie served as Humanitarian Policy and Advocacy Manager at Plan International, where she led global advocacy on girls in crisis. She has consulted for UNDP's Regional Hub for Arab States on conflict prevention and peacebuilding, and human rights. And has researched and provided analysis on issues under Women, Peace and Security Agenda for UN Women's Peace and Security Team and Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Division, including on forced marriage and sexual slavery in conflict contexts, and the gender dimensions of counter-terrorism policies and preventing violent extremism. Leslie is a graduate of Pace University, Brooklyn Law School, and NYU’s Center for Global Affairs.

Lina Abou-Habib is currently the senior gender advisor at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut. She is also the chair of collective for Research and Training for Development – Action and serves as a board member for Gender at Work as well as the MENA strategic advisor for the Global Fund for Women. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Gender and Development journal published by Oxfam. Abou-Habib was previously the Executive Director of Women’s Learning Partnership and before that, the director of the Collective for Research and Training-Action. She has led in designing and managing programs in the Middle East and North Africa region on issues related to gender and citizenship, economy, trade, and gender and leadership. She has considerable experience in qualitative research, gender analysis, and training/facilitation. She was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Applied Humanities, Institute of Public Policy (Auckland University of Technology). As a global gender consultant, Abou-Habib worked in most countries of the MENA region, in West Africa, and the Caucuses. [Image Credit: Global Fund for Women]

Loujain AlHathloul was born on 31 July 1989 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After spending 5 years in Jeddah, her family moved to France for five years after which they returned to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, Loujain studied at Dar Al-Ulum until her graduation, and moved to Canada to pursue her Bachelors in French Literature. She graduated from the University of British Columbia in 2013. After her Bachelors, Loujain worked and started her MA in Social Research at Sorbonne University in Abu-Dhabi. She was due to graduate from Sorbonne University the year she got arrested. In 2019, she was awarded a Honorary Doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Loujain’s activism began during her studies in Canada, through her social media. She became one of the leaders in the Saudi Women’s Rights movement, reshaping the process of mass collective consciousness-raising and developing a fully articulated understanding of women’s varying social positions. She was a main voice in the movements “Together We Stand to End Male Guardianship of Women” and “Women Demand the Overthrow of Guardianship” raising awareness online and sharing information. She conducted a “driving campaign” where she and other advocates took pictures of themselves driving in the streets of Saudi Arabia in defiance of the driving ban. As part of a working group, she established a shelter for women escaping domestic violence that not only provided a place to go but helped them integrate back into society. Loujain has done this at great cost to herself and her well-being. For her efforts, she has been arrested three times. However, she remains driven by an enormous desire to contribute to improving the conditions for children and women in Saudi Arabia. Loujain was ranked third in the list of "Top 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2015". On 14 March 2019, PEN America announced that Nouf Abdulaziz, Loujain AlHathloul, and Eman Al-Nafjan would receive the 2019 PEN America/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. Loujain was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2019 and nominated by multiple persons for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020. [Image Credit: Lina AlHathloul]

Lü Pin（吕频）is a leading Chinese feminist activist focusing on strategic advocacy to combat gender-based discrimination and violence, and also an award-winning independent journalist. She started her work on women’s rights in the late 1990s. In 2009, she founded Feminist Voices, China’s largest new media platform on women’s issues. Since 2012, she has been devoted to supporting the activism of young feminists across China. After relocating to the U.S., she co-founded an innovation with the aim of creating cross-border fronts for the Chinese feminist movement. She now resides in Albany, New York, from where she keeps a close collaboration with her associates in China and the U.S.

Marilyn Muthoni Kamuru is a feminist, entrepreneur, lawyer, writer and policy adviser. She is an ardent advocate for women and gender equality and equity. She is an expert on the Access to Government Procurement Opportunities Programme (AGPO), the Kenyan government’s globally recognized procurement policy that reserves 30%of all public procurement for women, youth and persons living with disabilities Among other things she has: been the lead petitioner in precedent setting cases against the State on gender equality and women’s inclusion; served as an adviser on legislation and public interest litigation on gender equality; served as an adviser to the Cabinet Secretary on Gender; co-authored a seminal report analyzing women’s influence post 2010 Constitution; and is a founding member of the #WeAre52pc feminist collective which was the first to petition the Chief Justice for the dissolution of the Kenyan parliament for its refusal to enact legislation on women’s representation. Marilyn sits on various boards including the African Legal Think Tank on Women’s Rights. In addition to consulting on gender equality in the region, she is currently writing a book on state sponsored backlash in Kenya exploring the multi-year denial of women’s constitutional right to representation by the government and women’s role in promoting the rule of law and as constitution makers’ post-promulgation.

Masana Ndinga-Kanga works to ensure that civic liberties are respected for groups advancing human rights around the world, with a specific focus on the Crisis Funding, the MENA region and Women Human Rights Defenders. Masana is also lead author on UNDP report (and journal article) "Forging a Resilient Social Contract in South Africa: States and Societies Sustaining Peace in the Post-Apartheid Era." She is a Peer Reviewer on the Racial Equity Index and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equality at the London School of Economics. In 2019, she produced a documentary and research series called ‘Triple Jeopardy: Race, Class and Gender among the Black Middle Class in South Africa’ and frequently writes on feminist parenting as an act of justice – including authoring book chapter “The Necessity of Rage and the Politics of Feminist Parenting.” Masana attempts to live her activism in humility, through reflexivity. She is deeply passionate about radical justice, collective care and shared accountability. She has worked to co-build collective action for feminist praxis, research and policy across multiple spheres. “It is impossible that this work of radical feminism be done by one – there is no ‘one’ person with the answers – the answer lies in collective feminist power.” She feels deeply humbled and surprised to have been nominated – recognizing the activists who live on the frontlines devoting their entire lives to the realization of justice. She has an MSc in Political Economy of Late Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science, which she received while a Chevening Scholar. A feminist economist and activist, she is fiercely passionate about feminist parenting, queer and economic justice in Africa through the transformation of the international political economy.

Michèle Pierre-Louis served as the Prime Minister of Haiti from 2008 to 2009, and is the second woman to hold this position. She was born in 1947 and studied Economics at the University of New York where she got her MA in 1976. She holds honorary degrees in the humanities from Saint Michael College, Vermont, and the University of San Francisco. In 2010, she was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. She worked as a clerk in a Bank and as Assistant Director General in the National Airport Authority of Port-au-Prince. She also owned and directed a small Business for several years. In 1985 she started working as a Consultant Manager of the Fondation Haïtienne de Développement. She then became a National Trainer with the Misyion Alfa, the national programme of alphabetisation of the Catholic Church of Haiti. From 1989 until 1991 she was appointed Research Director of the Cultural Institute Karl Lévêque, which enabled her to participate actively in the construction of the civil society. In 1991, she became a Member of the Presidential Cabinet of Aristide and was put in charge, i. a., for the redefinition of missions of the State. In 1995, she started working as the Director Executive for the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté – FOKAL until she was appointed as the Prime Minister of the Republic of Haiti. Pierre-Louis was also a University teacher prior to becoming Prime Minister. Her courses focused on “Culture and society in the Caribbean” and “The History of the Great Civilizations.” She was a member of a review “Chemins Critiques” which published several issues on politics, economics, arts and culture, from 1989 through 2006. She has also contributed to several books and reviews. Currently, she acts as the President of the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté – FOKAL and is the Director of the Reconstruction and Development Programme of the Open Society Institute in New York. She has also been working as a Professor at the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Quisqueya since 2004. [Image Credit: Council of Women World Leaders]

Purity is a feminist activist and storyteller based in Nairobi, Kenya and serves as the Director for With and For Girls Fund and Collective, the world’s only participatory fund by, and for adolescent girls. Purity previously served as the Executive Director of Akili Dada, a leadership incubator for girls and young women. Purity is passionate about nurturing girls' freedom and agency, gender equality as well as enabling girls and young women to access spaces to advance themselves and their communities. She sees herself as a learning leader who is committed to cultivating authentic and empathetic leadership in herself and others. Purity has dedicated her life to ensuring that girls and young women, especially from poor backgrounds can have opportunities to dream and work towards the futures they hope to see. Purity serves as an advisory member of East Africa Girls’ Brain Trust, and has previously served as a founding advisory committee member of the FRIDA |The Young Feminist Fund. In early 2015, she was named as one of the 18 Phenomenal African Feminists to know and watch. In 2016, she was named a finalist of the Most Influential Women in Governance and Business in Africa.

Dr. Rebecca Calder brings passion and rigor to the challenges of increasing gender equality and advancing social inclusion. She has a PhD in anthropology and nearly thirty years of policy and field experience in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. As a feminist anthropologist, Rebecca applies her deep contextual understanding of intersectional identities and power dynamics, social and gender norms, and political economy issues to her work leading research, training, evaluations, designs, strategy development, and project implementation. She is increasingly marrying her ethnographic expertise with participatory design to create innovative and better ways to understand the barriers to and opportunities for greater equality and inclusion, and to apply this in the co-creation of solutions. Rebecca's thought leadership in the sphere of girls' and women's empowerment has produced a significant body of cutting-edge research that has informed programming and policy for bilateral and multilateral agencies, country governments, non-profits, and the private sector. Her recent work has included exploring the role of the private sector in shifting gender norms, supporting feminist movement building in Mongolia, and strengthening local qualitative research capacity in 7 countries in South and South East Asia. Through the provision of strategic, evidence-based and creative counsel, Rebecca has supported over 70 social enterprises across Africa and Asia to develop products and services for girls and women that demonstrate impact. In 2019, Rebecca co-founded Kore Global Consulting, a feminist women led-consultancy practice, with her long-time colleague and friend, Emily Boost. Rebecca is a Board Member of KadAfrica, a social impact enterprise that works with Ugandan adolescent girls and young women.

S. Laurel Weldon (University of Pittsburgh, 1999) is Distinguished SFU Full Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraser University in Canada and co-editor of the American Political Science Review. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She previously held a Distinguished Professorship at Purdue University in Indiana, USA, where she also served as Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI) (2016-2018), founding Director of the Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion (2012-2015), Vice-Provost for Faculty Affairs (2013-2014), and (briefly) Provost (Summer 2014). In 2015, Weldon held the O’Brien Residential Fellowship in the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism at McGill University, Canada. She was a founding co-editor of the journal Politics, Groups and Identities. Professor Weldon’s work focuses on the role of social movements in influencing public policy; on violence against women; representation and public policy; women, work and poverty; and on comparative and international research that is global in scope. Weldon has won numerous awards, including, most recently, the Best Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the International Studies Association for her 2018 book The Logics of Gender Justice co-authored with Mala Htun. She has consulted for international organizations such the UN and the World Bank as well as national, state, local and Indigenous governments.

Dr. Stella Nyanzi is a multiple award-winning medical anthropologist with specialization in sexual and reproductive health, sexual rights and human sexualities in Uganda and The Gambia. She self-identifies as a radical queer feminist scholar, social justice activist, human rights defender, non-violent protester, poet, Facebooker, opposition politician belonging to the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), former aspirant for Kampala Woman Member of Parliament (2020-2021), an ex-prisoner from Luzira Women’s Maximum-Security Prison, and mother of three teenagers. She obtained her doctoral degree from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2009) based on ethnography of youth sexualities in The Gambia, Master of Science degree in Medical Anthropology from University College London (1999), and Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Literature from Makerere University (1997). She is widely published as an academic scholar, social commentator, and creative writer. She has organized and participated in several peaceful protests and non-violent demonstrations against human rights abuses, government failings, misogyny, homophobia and oppression in Uganda, may of which have ended in arrest, police detention and charging in court. She protested against the violence surrounding the Anti-Pornography Bill, allied with LGBTIQ to variously challenge the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, contributed to parliamentary review of the Mental Treatment Act, participated in civil action against the Public Order Management Act, and reviewed the Computer Misuse Act. Her most recent protests were against human rights violations emerging from Uganda’s COVID19 lockdown. Currently, she is living with her children in exile in Kenya having fled from political persecution in Uganda in January 2021.

Tara Abrahams is a managing director of Arabella Advisors, a certified B-Corp that provides strategic guidance for effective philanthropy. Tara leads Arabella’s work with corporations, with a special interest in advancing gender equality. Tara is the board chair of She’s the First, an organization that collaborates with grassroots partners in 12 countries to advance girls’ rights, provide feminist mentorship, and train adolescent girls in sexual and reproductive health. She recently joined the board of the International Center for Research on Women, the world’s premier research institute focused on tackling challenges facing women and girls worldwide. Tara is the founder of kahani, a magazine and media platform specifically designed to elevate the stories of adolescent girls around the world, debuting in 2021. Prior to Arabella, Tara served as managing director of VOW, a campaign and consumer brand that mobilizes the wedding industry to end child marriage around the world. Tara began her work in girls’ empowerment as the deputy director and president of Girl Rising, a global campaign and feature film that reached millions of viewers and activists around the world. She then went on to serve as executive director of The Girl Project at Glamour and advise organizations such as Girls Who Code and the Girls Opportunity Alliance at the Obama Foundation, founded by former first lady Michelle Obama. Tara graduated with honors from Harvard College and completed her MBA at the Harvard Business School, where she received the Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowship for outstanding contributions to the nonprofit sector.

Anne-Marie Lévesque is Head, Gender and Impact at FinDev Canada, Canada’s bilateral development finance institution (DFI), where she is responsible for the development and implementation of FinDev Canada’s Gender Equality Strategy and Development Impact Framework. Her role is to ensure that a gender lens is applied to all transactions, and that investments bring leading approaches to women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in private sector activities. Anne-Marie is very active in the global gender lens investing community. Between August 2019 and July 2020, she served as the Chair of the 2X Challenge, an initiative of the G7 DFIs aiming to mobilize unprecedented amounts of capital to invest in women. As of 2020, 2X Challenge members had committed and mobilized a total of $4.5 billion in gender-smart investments, surpassing their initial target of $3 billion and welcoming additional members into the fold. Prior to joining FinDev Canada, Anne-Marie was a consultant at Ergon Associates, where she advised private sector companies, development finance institutions and international organizations on their human rights, gender equality and labour practices.

Katherine Hay is the Deputy Director, Gender Equality, at the Gates Foundation, where she leads several initiatives for women’s economic empowerment. That work includes strengthening gender data, addressing barriers such as women’s unpaid care work, closing gaps in women’s employment and enterprise, and scaling successful platforms such as women’s empowerment collectives. She supports her team to work with local experts to build and support sustainable in-country gender institutions. She rapidly mobilized partnerships to generate and amplify evidence on the gender impacts of COVID-19. Katherine spent two decades in South Asia where she led evaluations of large scale maternal and child health programs, bringing an intersectional gender lens to that work – asking, ‘who is being left behind?’ Before joining the foundation, she was an evaluation specialist at the International Development Research Centre, where she led work on women’s collectives, livelihoods, economic inclusion, and health equity. Katherine coined ‘evaluation field building,’ positioning evaluation as transformative, and wrote on, and led work in feminist evaluation and policy. Her work with self-help groups goes back to 2005, when she supported some of the first women’s health and empowerment groups in India. Recent publications include work on gender norms and health systems, intimate partner violence, and women’s groups.

Lori Adelman is Vice President, Influence and Engagement at Global Fund for Women where she oversees strategic communications, partnerships and special initiatives. She is thrilled to be supporting the implementation of Global Fund for Women’s new strategic plan with a focus on supporting gender justice movements globally to thrive. Previously, Lori ran Feministing, an independent blog founded in 2004 that saw 1.2 million unique monthly visitors at its peak, and led youth engagement at Women Deliver supporting 700+ young changemakers around the world with strategies and resources to boost their impact. An advocate and media maker with 10+ years of experience promoting reproductive, racial, and gender justice globally, Lori also previously served at Planned Parenthood Federation of America as Director of Global Communications and has worked at the United Nations Foundation and the International Women’s Health Coalition. She is on Twitter @Ladelman.

Michelle Milford Morse is the UN Foundation’s Vice President for Girls and Women Strategy. She leads the Foundation’s organization-wide efforts to promote gender equality and the rights and agency of all girls and women, working in collaboration with the United Nations and its partners. Michelle has worked on global health and development issues with a range of UN, private sector, and civil society partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Livestrong, UNICEF USA, Sesame Workshop, the UBS Optimus Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, mothers2mothers, amFAR, ICRW, and the University of Texas. Through her work she has helped organizations define strategic paths and advance specific global development causes – including on child development, regulatory action on HIV treatment, maternal mortality, mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and ending violence against children. She previously advised the UN Foundation and led a range of projects related to gender equality, including serving as the Foundation’s co-convener on the Girl Declaration. Michelle was also press secretary and communications director for U.S. Congressman Lloyd Doggett. Michelle earned a Master of International Affairs and a Master of Public Health at Columbia University, and pursued her graduate research at the Rakai Health Sciences Program in Kalisizo, Uganda. She is a proud graduate of the University of Texas (Hook ’em!). Michelle is the former chair of the board of directors of the Ann Richards School Foundation and serves on the board of directors for the Livestrong Foundation and the Global Advisory Council of the Miracle Foundation.

Dr. Anne-Marie Goetz is an academic and policy-maker who has focused on how to increase women’s numbers and influence in public decision-making roles, with specific attention to women’s participation in conflict-resolution and peacebuilding in fragile states. She is a professor of practice at the Center for Global Affairs, School of Professional Studies, New York University, and a Professorial Fellow Emeritus at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She served at the United Nations from 2005-2010 in UNIFEM as Senior Advisor on Governance, Peace and Security, and 2010 – 2014 as Director of Peace and Security. While at the UN Dr. Goetz built cross-institutional coordination to ensure that the Security Council addresses sexual violence in conflict as a tactic of warfare, and to build peacekeepers’ capacities to detect and prevent these abuses. She worked with feminist civil society groups to push the UN Security Council to expand its repertoire in relation to women, peace and security, including through improved data on gender and conflict. Dr. Goetz’s academic work has focused on gender and conflict. gender mainstreaming in development practice, as well as the gendered politics of democratization and anti-corruption campaigns. She has written and edited seven books and many dozens of articles on these topics, and is currently researching the implications of the drift towards electoral autocracy, or illiberal democracy, for advancing women’s rights, particularly in conflict-affected states.

Rasha Jarhum is a South Yemeni. Jarhum is co-founder and Director of the Peace Track Initiative. Jarhum has been supporting inclusion of women in the peace process in Yemen and protecting women human rights defenders. She has led efforts to draft the Yemeni National Agenda for Women, Peace, and Security and led civil society consultations for supporting the development of the National Action Plan for Implementing UNSC 1325 resolution in Yemen. She is a Gender, Peace, and Security Expert with more than 15 years’ experience working to advocate women’s, children’s and refugees’ rights with many organisations including Oxfam, UNICEF, ESCWA, and UNDP. Jarhum was invited among seven women by the UN Special Envoy to Yemen to support the peace talks held in Kuwait in 2016 and has briefed the UN Security Council on Yemen and Women’s Rights to push for peace. Jarhum holds a master’s degree from the University of Nottingham, in International Business Management. Jarhum is an award winner of the Women Have Wings Award (2016) and Women Rebels Against War: Anita Augspurg Prize (2019). She is a member of the Women Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) and member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, at Ottawa University. She is also a 2016 New Voices Aspen fellow at Aspen Institute, USA. She is also a founding member of the Women Solidarity Network in Yemen, and a member of the MENA regional Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders and member of the Women, Peace, and Security Network- Canada.

Shehnaz Cassim Moosa grew up in a small town on the East Coast of South Africa. She attended the University of Cape Town where she read for a BA in film and media studies. Finding herself most intrigued by post-colonial literature, she pivoted in her studies and went on to read for a post-graduate diploma in African studies and gender studies, followed by an Honours in Justice and Transformation. While at UCT, she was elected onto the SRC. In 2005 she was awarded the Mandela-Unilever scholarship and attended the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies where she read for a MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development. Shehnaz has an activist spirit and worked for two Cape Town based NGOs in the early years of her career. A self-diagnosed career student, she read for a LLB degree part time with UNISA and is now reading for a LLM degree in Multi-level government and Local government at UWC. She is interested to explore the nexus between urban resilience, and the ‘right to the city’ in her research. Shehnaz has a passion project, called 1001 South African Stories, for which she was awarded the volunteer of year and the most innovative heritage project from the Western Cape Government in 2019. Shehnaz is committed to social justice and women’s empowerment, and is the Corporate services chapter convenor of the Women in Leadership at the City of Cape Town.

Sam Mostyn has spent the past 30 years engaged in creating a more diverse & inclusive, equitable and fair world, particularly for women. She has long advocated for policies and practices for the full inclusion of women in society, and in recent years focussed on the issue of eliminating violence against women. Her work has encompassed sectors from business to sport to the arts and civil society, international development and politics. In 2005, she was the first woman to be appointed the Commission of the Australian Football League, from where she pioneered the development of a women’s senior league competition (AFLW). Sam currently chairs the Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), Australians Investing In Women, and The Foundation for Young Australians. She has recently been appointed President of Chief Executive Women, and is Deputy Chair of The Centre for Policy Development. She was an inaugural Commissioner with the National Mental Health Commission, and was Deputy Chair of the Diversity Council of Australia for many years. Sam has a long-held interest in sustainability, and chairs The Climate Council. She was also a founding supporter and Chair of the women’s climate action group 1 Million Women and serves on the Australian faculty of the Cambridge University Business & Sustainability Leadership Program. After the promulgation of the UN SDGs, Sam was a member of the Global Business & Sustainable Development Commission and worked with Global Compact Australia in partnership with the Australian Council for International Development to advance work on the SDGs in Australia, with a particular focus on SDG5. Sam was a member of the National Sustainability Council and currently the National Sustainable Development Council. In 2018, Sam was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the Australian National University, in recognition of her work as a pioneer of gender inclusion and equity, and leadership in sustainability. Sam was awarded an AO in the 2021 Australia Day Honours for distinguished service to business and sustainability, and to the community, through seminal contributions to women through a range of organisations.

Tanya Pineda is responsible for developing and measuring the impact of gender equity efforts across the City of Los Angeles workforce, helping departments develop innovative policies, programs, and initiatives to move the needle on gender equity. She recently lead the City’s third round of gender equity action plans that cover 38 City departments and 50,000 employees. Each department is responsible for developing goals, putting them into effect, and tracking metrics for progress under Tanya’s guidance. Additionally, she supported Los Angeles’ involvement as a founding city of the City Hub and Network for Gender Equality (CHANGE), an international network of cities committed to advancing gender equity. Tanya not only facilitated Los Angeles’ participation, but made meaningful contributions to the network’s charter that was developed alongside the other founding cities to support cities’ ability to collaborate effectively, share best practices, and demonstrate sustainable and data-driven results. Tanya also supported the City of Los Angeles’ efforts in launching its Paid Parental Time pilot program for City employees. Prior to joining the City of Los Angeles, Tanya served as a Project Manager at various companies many of which were women-led enterprises. As a native Angelena, she is passionate about creating sustainable change in Los Angeles. Through her work, she looks forward to contributing to the ongoing efforts of making Los Angeles a leading city for gender equity.

Elizabeth Odio Benito serves as a judge (2016-2021) and current President of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2020-2022). She has over 50 years of experience defending human rights. Judge Benito previously served on the International Criminal Court (2003-2012) as well as the the International ad hoc Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1993-1998). Professor Emeritus of the University of Costa Rica, she has been honoured with several awards including the Honoris Causa Doctorate from the University of St. Edward (USA), and has been nominated for “1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.” She was Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Sub-Commission on Discrimination and Intolerance based on Religion or Creed. In 2000, she was elected Chair of the Working Group on the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Judge Benito greatly contributed to its adoption in 2002 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. She served as Second Vice-President of Costa Rica (1998-2002) and has served as Minister of Justice, Attorney General, Minister of Environment and Energy. She has been a member of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the main subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights. She has published extensively on human rights, international humanitarian law and international criminal law.[Image Credit: TEDx PuraVida]

Sodfa Daaji is a 28 year old Tunisian-Italian women’s rights advocate passionate about feminist jurisprudence, movement building and knowledge production. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the African Legal Think Tank on Women’s Rights, a continental institute aiming at addressing modern forms of violence against women while informing the general public on the legal framework and mechanisms in place. She is currently a Research Fellow at MS Training Centre for Development Cooperation (MS-TCDC), based in Arusha, researching governance and political leadership through an intersectional perspective, with an attention to the meaningful participation of young women and youth with disabilities. Among her previous professional experiences, she has consulted for the Youth Department of the Council of Europe, and she has coordinated and managed the African Young Women Beijing+25 Mobilization and Manifesto for the African Union Office of the Youth Envoy, culminating in a groundbreaking document amplifying the demand of African Young Women to Generation Equality Forum and Action Coalitions leadership. Sodfa has served as the co-chairperson of the Afrika Youth Movement, the largest pan-African youth movement, in the youth advisory council of UNGEI, United Nations Girls Education Initiative and in the coordinating collective of Africans Rising.

Joumana Haddad is a writer, journalist and activist for human rights, equality, freedom of expression and secularism in Lebanon. She was born in Beirut in 1970. She’s worked for Lebanon’s AnNahar newspaper from 1997 to 2017, being the cultural editor from 2005 onward. In 2009, she founded Jasad magazine- a quarterly Arabic-language cultural magazine that specializes in the literature, arts and sciences of the body. She taught creative writing at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and she’s also been the administrator of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction since its inception in 2007 and until 2011. In October 2018, Haddad launched her own TV show on Al Hurra Channel, where she highlights cases of human rights abuses, censorship, repression and discrimination against vulnerable groups in Arab countries. In 2019 she founded a youth-centered NGO, called the Freedoms Center, that raises awareness among Lebanese youth on the values of feminism, democracy and human rights. Haddad has published 15 books so far. Most of her works of fiction, non-fiction, theater and poetry have been translated into numerous languages and published around the world. Some of her titles include her feminist manifesto “I killed Scheherazade”, as well as “Superman is an Arab”, “Lilith’s Return” and “The Cage”. Her most recent publication is a fictional family memoir about the Armenian genocide, titled “The Seamstress’ daughter”. Since 2014, she is regularly selected as one of the world’s 100 most powerful Arab women for her cultural and social activism.

Sarah Hillware is an award-winning social entrepreneur, global health leader and gender equality champion. In 2012, she founded Girls Health Ed, a nonprofit changing harmful gender norms through its evidence-based approach to gender-transformative comprehensive health and sexuality education (CSE). Girls Health Ed has trained 150+ women educators and advocates, served 6,000 adolescents and reached approximately 25,000. It is currently led by Pavita Singh, and Sarah serves as Board Chair. Sarah has held roles at the World Bank, WHO and other UN agencies, and has a track record of implementing strategic stakeholder engagement, communications, and consensus-building processes to drive global action and national policy reform. She currently serves as Deputy Director of Women in Global Health (WGH), a 50,000-strong global movement and the largest network of women and allies working to challenge power and privilege for gender equity in health, co-founded and led by Dr. Roopa Dhatt. WGH takes an intersectional approach and includes supporters in 90+ countries and 24 chapters with strong presence in low- and middle-income countries. WGH drives policy change by mobilizing diverse emerging women leaders, advocating to existing leaders to commit to transform their institutions and holding them accountable. Sarah's research and experience on gender and health disparities in the US and globally have led her to give talks at TEDxBerkeley and the UN through TEDxUNPlaza. Sarah was named in the Leadership Center for Excellence's 2014 40 Under 40 list, and in 2020, was named a Fellow of The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Suzanne Biegel is the founder of Catalyst at Large and Co-Founder of GenderSmart, and a global leader in gender-smart investing. She leverages her deep networks in finance, philanthropy, development, research, entrepreneurship, and public policy to connect public and private investors to the people and information they need to move capital in a gender-smart way. Suzanne’s mission is to increase the flow of global capital to gender-smart investments and initiatives, to make sure this capital is used in ways that will generate the most impact, and to ensure that it reaches the entrepreneurs and innovators who need it in the most efficient way possible. To do this, she works with actors spanning the entire spectrum of investment to forge catalytic relationships, build collaboratives, and transform the entire system of global capital. Her work has influenced hundreds of funds and institutional investors in public and private finance, and billions of dollars of capital to move in this direction. Catalyst at Large leads research, advisory, and field building in the arena of gender-smart investing. Suzanne speaks and publishes, and is quoted extensively, on the state of the field. The GenderSmart Investing Summit brings together investment allocators, decision makers, and influencers from the public and private sector, to unlock gender-smart capital at scale. Suzanne is a graduate of Wharton Business School and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She and Catalyst at Large are based in London. [Full disclosure: Suzanne is a minority investor in Apolitical]

The Brussels Binder is a collective of 60 women volunteers which was founded in 2017 from a crowdfunding campaign. Through its database of women experts with over 1,700 profiles, the platform advocates for greater gender equality and diversity in policy discussions and media. During 2020, The Brussels Binder launched a number of new tools through the BBBeyond Project, which is a pan-European network of like-minded organisations, women expert databases and think thanks. Under the project, the first global online repository of women expert databases was created in an interactive map. It is estimated that over 57,000 women experts are represented in the map. In February 2021, the platform also launched a series of toolkits which were developed under a co-creational process with 40 diverse women. Each of the six toolkits aims to provide practical advice and tips on how to promote women's visibility in public debates from a different stakeholder perspective (e.g. Male allies, journalists, event organisers, etc.). The toolkits also include advice on how to go beyond gender to improve diversity and inclusion, and there are toolkits also catered to women on network and profile building. The Brussels Binder has been instrumental in raising awareness of the importance of equal gender representation by working with think tanks and other EU institutions. The Brussels Binder demonstrates the power of women working together to address a core issue through non-hierarchical organisation and collaboration.

The LasTesis Collective is a feminist artistic group performing in Chile. Their art seeks to hold into account state institutions that perpetuate violence, and became widely known in 2019 through the song “A Rapist in Your Path”, which resonated with women’s movements in the whole world and soon became an anthem for women’s rights. In May 2020, LasTesis published a new song alongside the Russian feminist group Pussy Riot. The song denounces police violence against women in Latin America, reflecting on the raise of domestic violence levels since the start of the pandemic and the economic inequalities that are contributing to the deaths of thousands of workers who cannot access adequate living and health care. [Image Credit: Frontline Defenders]

Doc Society is a non-profit founded in 2005 committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally. They are based in London and New York, and work with filmmakers and partners all over the world. They bring people together to unleash the transformational power of documentary film. Doc Society stands in solidarity with filmmakers and work to unite them with new friends and allies, building new models globally.

Global Health 50/50 is an independent, evidence-driven initiative to advance action and accountability for gender equality in global health. The collective and its work can only be deemed a success when global health policy and organisational decision-making puts a gender lens, gender equality and health equity at the core of all it does. For decades, the collective's members have researched, advised, advocated for, published and delivered policies and programmes to promote gender equality and health equity. Global Health 50/50 was borne out of their shared frustration that despite evidence, change wasn’t happening fast enough. Their academic outputs on gender and health were falling on deaf ears, so they decided to change the rules of the game. Global Health 50/50 was formed around a unique model which brings together the rigour of academic research, the knowledge of how policy change can occur and the momentum of advocates and communicators to catalyse progress. Coupled with a high-powered Advisory Council positioned to support this mission, their model is intended to act as a channel to bring evidence and policy together, thus fast-forwarding the pace of change for gender equality and health equity. The initiative brings together leading feminists, doctors, academics, policy and political experts from all corners of the world. From the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and UN policy leaders, to journalists, advocates and university academics, GH5050 is the most experienced and powerful team assembled to tackle this issue. Global Health 50/50 was co-founded and is co-directed by Professor Sarah Hawkes and Dr Kent Buse. It is supported by University College London, one of the world’s leading universities, where it is housed in the Centre for Gender and Global Health. They have received funding from The Wellcome Trust, among the world’s largest investors in health research, and a philanthropic donor who chooses to remain anonymous.

The Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) works with a global network of partners to build an inclusive industry that makes clean cooking accessible to the three billion people who live each day without it. Established in 2010, CCA is driving consumer demand, mobilizing investment to build a pipeline of scalable businesses, and fostering an enabling environment that allows the sector to thrive. Clean cooking transforms lives by improving health, protecting the climate and environment, empowering women, and helping consumers save time and money.

The Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP) is a research and advocacy organisation promoting a feminist approach to foreign and security policy. They believe foreign policy can be a mechanism for equality, justice, solidarity, and peace. But there can't be peace without feminism. They use advocacy, research, and community-building to change how foreign and security policy is being practised so that it creates a safer world for everyone, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Founded in 2016, they were the world’s first organisation explicitly dedicated to Feminist Foreign Policy. In the spring of 2019, they were recognised on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for their work. CFFP was co-founded by Marissa Conway and Kristina Lunz and soon after Nina Bernarding joined. Marissa oversees CFFP’s work in the UK as a not-for-profit (limited by guarantee), and Kristina and Nina co-direct the operations of the gemeinnützige GmbH (charitable LLC) in Germany as Geschäftsführerinnen (Managing Directors).