Our Board of Directors
AWID’s board members are drawn from a diverse constituency of policy makers, academics, researchers, activists, funders, practitioners, and business people committed to gender equality, mostly from the global South. The board is elected by the AWID membership through an open election process.
| Lina Abou-Habib - Board President |
Lina Abou-Habib is the director of the Collective for Research and Training-Action (WLP-Lebanon) based in Beirut and working in the Arab region. She advises the Women Learning Partnership on several initiatives, and is coordinating the development of curriculum on women’s economic empowerment. She has collaborated 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 and has worked with a number of regional and international agencies, including the Royal Tropical Institute, UNIFEM, Kvinfo, EMHRN, as well as public institutions, in mainstreaming gender in development policies and practices and in building capacities for gender mainstreaming. Prior to that, Lina was the Programme Coordinator for Oxfam GB in Lebanon. Lina is a programme advisor for the Global Fund for Women and is on the editorial board of Oxfam’s journal, Gender and Development. |
| Lydia Alpízar - Executive Director of AWID |
Lydia is a Costa Rican feminist activist who lives in Sao Paulo. She has been the Executive Director of AWID since 2007, and was the manager of the Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? and Building Feminist Movements and Organizations Strategic Initiatives of AWID from 2003-2006. Lydia is co-founder and advisor of ELIGE - Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights (Mexico), and she is also co-founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights. She is on the Board of Directors for the Global Fund for Women and is a member of the International Council on Human Rights Policy. Lydia is a member of the Board of Directors of the Central American Women’s Fund. She is also a graduate from the Human Rights Advocacy Training Program at the Center for the Study of Human Rights in Columbia University in NYC. Lydia has extensive experience in advocacy and training on women's human rights, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights and violence against women. |
| Marilyn Waring – Treasurer |
Marilyn Waring is a feminist activist and political economist from New Zealand. She was a key note speaker for AWID in Washington in 1999, on the Steering Committee for the Guadalajara conference in 2002, and an aging rocker at the Saturday party in Bangkok. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at AWID in Toronto on two occasions. Marilyn's seminal work, Counting for Nothing/ If Women Counted has been an extraordinary tool for recording the invisibility of women's work. She has led bi and multi lateral development work in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal and throughout the Pacific. She was elected to the New Zealand parliament at 23 and chaired the Public Accounts and Expenditure Committee for two terms. She is now a Professor of Public Policy at AUT University in Auckland New Zealand, and is a Member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. |
| Natasha L. Primo |
Natasha is a feminist ICT4D researcher and advocate based in Johannesburg, South Africa with a master’s degree in Regional Planning. Natasha presently works at the local government level with the City of Cape Town. She has previously been responsible for coordinating and building capacity for national ICT policy advocacy strategies among member organisations of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and was the Executive Director of Women's Net. Natasha’s experiences include coordinating of one of the earliest South African women’s and gender studies postgraduate programmes (at the University of the Western Cape), a programme coordinator in a national research funding institution, as well as executive management in an NGO in the areas of information and communications for development. She has published on a range of issues on women’s empowerment in South Africa, including gender budgeting, women and land, African women and the challenges of globalization. Natasha’s NGO governance experience spans both ICT organisations as well as feminist NGOs, including time spent on the board for APC, African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) and Behind the Mask. |
| Fatima Burnad |
Fatima, the President of the Society for Rural Education and Development (SRED) is a Dalit woman activist who has been fighting for the rights of Dalits, Landless and Tribal Women for the past 35 years. Fatima has promoted people's movements among the unorganized sector, empowering rural women to take up political power and economic strength through land struggles, and to gain status in society. She has been instrumental in promoting her brainchild, the state level platform for the women of Tamil Nadu in India, the Tamil Nadu Women's Forum (TNWF), by bringing together women's groups as well as human rights groups. Fatima has been working for the cause of the rural poor, especially Dalits and Irulas, towards eradicating the caste system and for the assertion of justice and equality. She has studied in the US and in the UK and has been a Research Fellow at the IDS, Sussex in the UK. |
| Tarcila Rivera Zea |
Tarcila is a Quechuan journalist who was born in Vilcashuamán, Ayacucho. For more than 25 years, she has been an activist for the rights of indigenous peoples and indigenous women. She has actively contributed to the advancement of indigenous women, children and youth in the national and international level, primarily at the United Nations and at international forums. As a founder of Chirapaq, Tarcila devises and develops actions that contribute to cultural reaffirmation, intercultural education, the empowerment of indigenous women and food security to eradicate malnutrition, always from an indigenous perspective. More specifically, her contributions to the empowerment of indigenous women have resulted in the creation of the Permanent Workshop of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru, the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (known as FIMI) and the Continental Network of Indigenous Women of the Americas. Her professional experience is centred on communications and editorial and journalistic actions relating to the sustainable development of indigenous women and indigenous peoples. |
| Victoria Tauli-Corpuz |
Victoria is an indigenous activist belonging to the Kankana-ey Igorot peoples of the Cordillera region in the Philippines. With 30 years of experience, Victoria is committed to, and continues to work for, the recognition, protection, and promotion of Indigenous Peoples' rights and women's rights at the national and global level. Victoria was centrally involved in the drafting and negotiations of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples until this was adopted in 2007. She is Executive Director of the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Center for Policy Research & Education), an organization that has United Nations consultative status and is based in Baguio City, Philippines. Victoria also founded the Asia Indigenous Women's Network (AIWN) and from 2005 - 2009, was the Chairperson of the United Nations Permanent Form on Indigenous Issue. Victoria also plays a few other roles: co-president of the International Forum on Globalization as well as the Indigenous and Gender Adviser of the Third World Network, commissioner of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, member of the National Council of GABRIELA (Philippines), founder and Director of the Cordillera Women's Education and Resource Center (1986-1996), and Convenor of the World Summit on Sustainable Development Indigenous Peoples Caucus (2002). |
| Sarah Costa |
Sarah Costa is the Executive Director of the Women's Refugee Commission, a non-profit organization that advances women's rights by making grants that support and strengthen women's groups around the world. Before this, she was a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation managing programs on sexuality and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS and women's rights in Latin America and the U.S. She also worked for many years in Brazil at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation where she taught and conducted research on gender and sexual and reproductive health. Active in the women's movement in Brazil, she was a member of the Advisory Committee to the National Council on Women's Rights, served on the boards of several women's NGOs and was a Technical Advisor on Women's Health to the State Government of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently on the board of the National Centers on Sexuality at San Francisco State University. She holds a Masters degree in Medical Demography from London University and a Ph.D. in Social Medicine from Oxford University. |
| Undarya Tumursukh |
Undarya Tumursukh has been involved in Mongolia's civil society development and women's rights work since 1992, when the first women's NGOs began to emerge following the transition from socialism to democracy. In 1997, she co-founded the National CEDAW Watch Network and assisted the CEDAW Watch Center's programs as an advisor until 2003. Educated as a political scientist at Rutgers University, she was one of the key organizers of the International Civil Society Forum for Democracy in 2003. She played a key role in initiating the annual national forum Through Women's Eyes and With Women's Power organized by the National Network of Mongolian Women's NGOs since 2006. In 2007, she agreed to serve as the National Coordinator for the network (MONFEMNET since 2007). Earlier this year, Undarya replaced her country predecessor on the Migration Taskforce of the Asia Pacific Women's Forum on Law and Development (APWLD) and the Steering Committee of the Asia Pacific Women's Watch (APWW). |
| Monika Ladmanova |
Monika Ladmanova (Czech Republic) is the Chairperson of International Gender Policy Network Executive Board. The network operates in the region of Central, Eastern and South Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union with a mission to pursue gender accountability of governments and advocate for women's rights at the national, regional and global level. Monika is former Director of the Open Society, Public Benefit Association, where she worked on advocacy programs for women, including a joint initiative of Czech NGOs to enforce equal opportunities through legislation. She serves as the Board member of a joint Czech-Slovak Women's Fund, a bi-country organization generating resources to support the promotion of women's rights and to implement the principle of gender equality. She is also a lawyer and participates in various NGO platforms and coalitions to campaign for drafting and adopting quality legislation in the country. |
| To Tjoelker |
To Tjoelker is currently the Head of Cooperation at the Netherlands embassy in Bamako, Mali . Since starting in this role in 2007, she has promoted gender strategies in every grant of the Netherlands, and set up an emancipation Fund of 20 million US$ promoting women’s rights and GLBT rights. In the 1980s, she worked as a Gender Specialist for the Swiss Cooperation in Rwanda, and was a founder of Rwandese Network on women and Development (Réseau des Femmes pour le Développement Rural). From 1993-1998, she focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment in land tenure programs, decentralisation processes and sexual rights programs through her position as a Gender/decentralisation specialist at the Netherlands Embassy in Burkina Faso. In 1998, her work took her to Guatemala, where her focus shifted to promoting gender equality in environmental programs and worked with indigenous movements through the Embassy. She served as the Deputy Head of the Gender Unit at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands from 2002-2006. As chair of Gendernet, she introduced women’s rights and empowerment in discussions on the efficiency of Aid in civil society. To holds a Masters in Rural Development Sociology from the University of Wageningen and achieved a Specialisation in Institutional development from MDF in 1992. |