About us

Lina Abou-Habib is the Director of Al Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut.  She also teaches undergraduate and graduate gender courses at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University of Beirut.  She serves as the Chair of Collective for Research and Training for Development – Action and 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.

Lina Abou-Habib was previously the Executive Director of Women’s Learning Partnership  and before that, the director of CRTD.A. She has worked extensively with the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) and with several international and regional organisations in designing and managing programmes 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.

Founder and former director of Salmmah Women Centre

Fahima Hashim a feminist activist for over 25 years, experienced in action research and feminist training, in the areas of women and peace, Violence Against Women and feminist movement building. Fahima is devoting her life to promote radical change for women/young women and their place in society.

Board member of Nazra for Studies and Research working with women in the MENA Region, and an advisory Board member for Doria Feminist Fund (first feminist fund for women in the MENA region).

She served as the Director for Salmmah Women’s Resource Centre which was forced closed by the Sudan government in June 2014.

Sussan Tahmasebi has been working to strengthen civil society and advocate women’s rights in Iran and in the MENA region for 20 years. Currently she serves as the Executive Director of FEMENA, an organization that supports women human rights defenders, their organizations and movements with a particular focus on transitioning contexts or contexts of limited or constrained civil society space in the MENA and Asia regions. Prior to this role, Tahmasebi was the Director of MENA/Asia region at the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) (2011-2017), an organization focused on promoting peace and security, which she co-founded. Between 1999-2010 Tahmasebi was based in Iran where she co-founded the Iran Civil Society Training and Research Center, focused on building the capacity of Iranian civil society and conducting social research. Tahmasebi is also a founding member the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots effort working to end gender-biased laws in Iran and continues to maintain strong ties to the Iranian civil society and women’s movement. Tahmasebi’s expertise include movement building in contexts of shrinking civic space, reform of women’s rights in Muslim societies, civil society capacity building and women’s peace and security in MENA and Asia region, among other issues.

In 2010 and 2011 Tahmasebi was honored for her work in Iran by Human Rights Watch with the Alison Des Forges Award for extraordinary activism, HRW’s highest honor. In 2011 she was named by Newsweek as one of 150 women who “Shake the World.” In 2016 she was awarded the Power to Inspire award by the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta Georgia, where her work as an advocate of women’s rights in Iran is featured. In 2016, Tahmasebi was honored by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) as a feminist activist who will make you hopeful for a future without fundamentalisms.

Tahmasebi is Iranian and American by birth and is fluent in both English and Farsi. She resides in Washington DC.

Follower her on Twitter: @sussantweets

Kishani Cader (she/her), ACMA, CGMA is a finance professional with extensive and diverse experience in the field of finance and governance relating to corporate as well as the not-for-profit sectors.

Kishani's expertise extends to overall financial management, governance, organizational management, donor and other stakeholder relationship management, strategic planning and implementation.

Through 18 years of experience in diverse senior management positions, Kishani has fine tuned her professional skills to focus on establishing a balance between governance while ensuring the core interests of the funded constituencies are retained. She currently serves as the Director, Finance, Compliance and Operations at Women’s Fund Asia Limited.

Remie Abi-Farrage is the Senior Program Officer in the Global Programs at the Equality Fund. Remie supports the organizations’ grant making and partner accompaniment strategies with their global partners.

Remie is deeply connected to feminist and youth movements globally, with valuable local and international experience on human rights philanthropy, advocacy, programming and social justice organizing.

Remie believes in shifting power through flexible core funding and respecting the autonomy and work of local organizations and groups, as main implementers, while donor organizations act as facilitators.

Senda Ben Jebara is a queer feminist from Tunisia, currently based in Montreal,QC, Canada. She has been involved in political organizing and in feminist and queer movements for the past 10 years.

She sat on the board of 'Chouf' and 'Mawjoudin', two LGBTQI+ organizations based in Tunisia, and co-organized The International Feminist Art Festival - Chouftouhonna and the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival.

Senda is a firm believer in intersectionality and has been involved in several projects across the Middle East and North Africa focusing on LGBTQI+ rights as well as migrant and refugee rights.

She worked with FRIDA - The Young Feminist Fund where she focused on online learning and in supporting young feminist organizing in South West Asia and the North Africa region and consulted with Article19 on LGBTQI+ research projects. She is passionate about cooking and discovering new cuisines.