About Us

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

She 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, designing and managing programmes in the Middle East and North Africa on issues related to gender and citizenship, economy, trade, and leadership. As a global gender consultant, Abou-Habib has worked in most countries of the MENA region, in West Africa and the Caucasus.

Founder and former director of Salmmah Women's Resource Centre, Fahima Hashim has been 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. She has devoted her life to promoting radical change for women and young women and their place in society.

She is a board member of Nazra for Feminist Studies, working with women in the MENA region, and an advisory board member for the Doria Feminist Fund. She served as the Director of Salmmah Women's Resource Centre, which was forced to close by the Sudanese government in June 2014.

Sussan Tahmasebi has been working to strengthen civil society and advocate for women's rights in Iran and across the MENA region for 20 years. She currently 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 civil society space in the MENA and Asia regions.

Previously, she was the Director of the MENA and Asia region at the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) from 2011 to 2017, an organization she co-founded. Between 1999 and 2010 she was based in Iran, where she co-founded the Iran Civil Society Training and Research Center. She is also a founding member of the One Million Signatures Campaign, a grassroots effort working to end gender-biased laws in Iran.

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

Kishani Cader (she/her), ACMA, CGMA is a finance professional with extensive and diverse experience in finance and governance across both the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Her expertise extends to overall financial management, governance, organizational management, donor and stakeholder relationship management, and 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 of Finance, Compliance and Operations at Women's Fund Asia.

Remie Abi-Farrage is the Senior Program Officer in the Global Programs at the Equality Fund, where she supports the organization's grantmaking and partner accompaniment strategies with global partners.

Remie is deeply connected to feminist and youth movements globally, with valuable local and international experience in human rights philanthropy, advocacy, programming and social justice organizing. She 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, 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 LBTQ+ organizations based in Tunisia, and co-organized the International Feminist Art Festival Chouftouhonna and the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival.

A firm believer in intersectionality, she has been involved in several projects across the Middle East and North Africa focusing on LBTQ+ rights as well as migrant and refugee rights. She worked with FRIDA, The Young Feminist Fund, where she focused on online learning and on supporting young feminist organizing in the South West Asia and North Africa region, and consulted with Article 19 on LBTQ+ research projects. She is passionate about cooking and discovering new cuisines.