Professor Sakena Yacoobi co-founded Creating Hope International and is President and Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL).

Yacoobi founded AIL in 1995 to provide teacher training to Afghan women, to support education for boys and girls, and to provide health education to women and children. Under Yacoobi’s leadership AIL has established itself as a groundbreaking, visionary organization that works at the grassroots level and empowers women and communities to find ways to bring education and health services to rural and poor urban girls, women and other poor and disenfranchised Afghans.

AIL was the first organization to offer human rights and leadership training to Afghan women. After the Taliban closed girls’ schools in the 1990s, AIL supported 80 underground home schools for 3,000 girls in Afghanistan. AIL was also the first organization that opened Women’s Learning Centers for Afghan women—a concept now copied by many organizations throughout the country. Using their grassroots strategies, AIL now serves 350,000 women and children each year through its Educational Learning Centers, schools and clinics in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As Founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN), Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE has over two decades of experience as a peace strategist working globally on conflicts, crises, violent extremism and peacebuilding with civil society, governments and the UN.

Through ICAN, she spearheads the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) comprising independent women-led organizations active in 40 countries globally, preventing violence and promoting peace, rights and pluralism. Under her leadership, ICAN has developed the multi-donor Innovative Peace Fund (IPF) to channel resources to local women-led peacebuilding organizations. Since its inception the fund has committed $7,000,000 across 25 countries. ICAN’s Better Peace Initiative (BPI) is also a flagship program providing strategic guidance, practical tools and capacity development for UN, governments, and civil society on best practices in inclusive design and gender responsiveness in peace processes.

From 2020 to September 2022, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini served as Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Centre for Women, Peace and Security, working to deepen links between scholarship, policy and practice in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and introducing the network of Women Mediators Across the Commonwealth (WMC) to the Centre.

Throughout her extensive career, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini has led groundbreaking initiatives in research, thought leadership, policy and practice. Key highlights include being a civil society leader, advocate and drafter of the seminal UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on WPS in 1999-2000; directing the Women Waging Peace Policy Commission in 2002-2004 with design and delivery of the first multi-country research initiative on the evidence of women’s contributions to peace processes; and publication of her book, Women Building Peace: What they do, why it matters (Rienner, 2007). Ms. Naraghi Anderlini designed and led the 10-country UNDP global initiative on “Gender, Community Security and Social Cohesion” as the first in-depth studies on the role and vulnerabilities of men in fragile contexts; she was appointed to the UN’s Standby Team (SBT) of Mediation Experts as the first Senior Expert on Gender and Inclusion working on Somalia, Libya and Syria, Sudan among other cases; and designs and delivers curricula on gender responsiveness in PVE and mediation for senior governmental, UN staff and mediators.

In November 2022, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini commenced an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2018, she has been an adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of International Public Affairs (SIPA). She serves on the Steering Board of the UK’s National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security and Prevention of Sexual Violence, the Commonwealth’s Panel of Experts on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), the WMC’s Steering Committee. Ms. Naraghi Anderlini also serves as Co-Chair of the Principles for Inclusive Peace Initiative.

Media: BBC World Service television and radio. Her editorials have appeared in numerous publications including The Guardian, The Observer, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Le Monde Diplomatique, Open Democracy, Common Dreams, and Ms. Magazine.

Awards: In 2020 in recognition for her work and for services to international peacebuilding and women’s rights, in the UK she was awarded an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). She was the 2016 Greeley Peace Scholar at the University of Massachusetts, and recipient of the 2014 UN Association Perdita Huston Award for human rights.

Personal: Ms. Naraghi Anderlini speaks four languages and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. Iranian by birth she is a UK and US citizen, and has identical twin daughters.

A Spanish-born international attorney and Co-Founder of Guernica 37, Almudena Bernabeu has led the prosecutions of several of the worst perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Latin America.

By filing cases in the Spanish national court, which practices universal jurisdiction, she obtained extradition orders for the 20 El Salvadoran military officers implicated in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuits, and in 2011, she persuaded the court to include the rapes of 100,000 Maya women in its ongoing investigation of the Guatemalan government for genocide. Her work led to the historic judgment of former president of Guatemala, Efrain Rios Montt, who in May 2013 was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Ixil Maya people. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Bernabeu also serves as a board member at Equatorial Guinea Justice, a U.S. based Human Rights organization, and is Chair of the International Human Rights Section at the San Francisco Bar Association. She is Vice-President of the Spanish Association for Human Rights (APDHE), and a member of the advisory board of the Peruvian Institute of Forensic Anthropology (EPAF), a forensic group providing evidence on human rights violations investigations and prosecutions. She holds a master’s in law from the University of Valencia School of Law, where she specialized in Public International Law. In 2012, Ms. Bernabeu won the prestigious Katharine & George Alexander Law Prize.

Joyful Clemantine is a social entrepreneur, connector, an internationally renowned speaker, and a New York Times Bestselling Author. Her memoir THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS debuted with Crown Publishing in April 2018, and since has been published in seven languages. Joyful is currently the founder of 10Houses, a private network dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurship and equity, and a co-founder and connector of THINGY, an online platform whose mission is to capture, organize, and share creative ways of being to foster belonging.

Joyful lives to connect communities and transform individualistic perspectives into balanced structures of exchange and interaction. She catalyzes development personally, locally, and globally by centering the mind, body and spirit as a site for personal and communal growth.

Joyful provides practical, emotional and mental strategies to rewire habits and make decisions that serve equity in self, the home, the community and the workplace.

Informed by her personal experiences growing up in nine different countries, mostly in war torn regions across central and east Africa, Joyful emboldens communities to bring awareness to divisive labels and ideology embedded in oppressive identities based on class, race, and gender. She invites everyone to bring awareness and action back to self: Who are we without words? Who are we without labels?

Joyful received her BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University with a focus in African and Women’s Studies in 2014.

Dawn Engle is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit organization, The PeaceJam Foundation, which brings youth together with thirteen Nobel Peace Prize Laureates including the 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Engle has been nominated eight times for the Nobel Peace Prize herself. She is the co-director of the award-winning documentary film, PEACEJAM and co-authored the book, PeaceJam: A Billion Simple Acts of Peace. In addition she directed the award-winning documentary films, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy and Mayan Renaissance, which is the first in a series of feature length documentaries in PeaceJam’s Nobel Legacy Film Series.

Engle began her career as an economist, working for the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C. She was the youngest women ever appointed to serve as Chief of Staff to a U.S. Senator. In 1991, she co-founded the Colorado Friends of Tibet, and in 1994, she and artist Ivan Suvanjieff began working together to create the PeaceJam program. Suvanjieff and Engle married in March 2000, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu presiding over the ceremony. In September 2008, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi and six other Nobel Peace Laureates joined together to launch PeaceJam’s Call to Action campaign calling for one billion acts of service and peace by the year 2018.

A longtime human rights advocate and former Amnesty International Legal Advisor, Karima Bennoune’s most recent book — published by W.W. Norton & Company — is entitled Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.

The book addresses resistance to fundamentalism in Muslim majority contexts, and is based on interviews she conducted with nearly 300 people in almost 30 countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Mali, Niger and Russia. It answers the question often posed in the West: “Where are the Muslims who speak out?” Bennoune finds that they are everywhere – but those who peacefully challenge extremism are not usually given the microphone. Increasingly frustrated with the stagnant, politicized public dialogue about the “clash of civilizations,” Bennoune set out on an epic journey to change the conversation.

Bennoune currently serves as a professor of international law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Research Scholar at the University of California–Davis School of Law. She grew up in Algeria and the United States.

2011 Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker and women’s rights advocate.

She currently serves as Executive Director of the Women, Peace and Security Program at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is the founder and current President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, the founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, as well as co-founder and former Executive Director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa (WIPSEN-A). She is also a founding member and former Liberian Coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). She travels internationally to advocate for human rights and peace & security.

Ms. Gbowee’s leadership of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace – which brought together Christian and Muslim women in a nonviolent movement that played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s civil war in 2003 – is chronicled in her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, and in the award-winning documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Ms. Gbowee holds an M.A. in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University (Harrisonburg, VA), and a Doctor of Laws (LLD) honoris causa from Rhodes University in South Africa and the University of Alberta in Canada.

Ms. Gbowee advises numerous organizations working for peace, women’s rights, youth, and sustainable development, and has held distinguished fellowships at Barnard College and Union Theologi­cal Seminary. In 2016, Ms. Gbowee was awarded the Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize (LAAP) for Peace in Africa by the Millennium Excellence Foundation. Ms. Gbowee serves as a Sustainable Development Goals Advocate for the United Nations and as a Member of the World Refugee Council. In 2017, Ms. Gbowee was selected by the United Nations Secretary General to serve as a Member of United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Advisory Board on Mediation. In 2018, she was appointed to the Gender Equality Advisory Council Secretariat for Canada’s G7 Presidency.

Leymah is the proud mother of eight children.

Marion Bethel’s decades-long advocacy for the rights of Bahamian women and girls spans the areas of human rights law, education, creative writing and film.

Marion Bethel’s decades-long advocacy for the rights of Bahamian women and girls spans the areas of human rights law, education, creative writing and film. Born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, Marion is currently a Partner and an Attorney-at-law with her husband at their law firm, Sears & Co., in The Bahamas Marion was awarded a Bachelor and Masters of Arts in Law from Cambridge University, and has been a practicing attorney since 1986.

In 2013, Ms. Bethel produced and directed a documentary entitled Womanish Ways: Freedom, Human Rights & Democracy, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Bahamas – 1948-1962, which examines the struggle for Bahamian women’s suffrage. Marion has also published two collections of poetry, and is currently working on a third manuscript of poetry and a memoir.

In 2016, Marion was nominated by The Bahamas and elected by the United Nations States Parties to serve as an international expert on the UN Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

She is a 1997 Alice Proskauer Poetry Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College at Harvard University. Her work has been featured at the 3rd Congress of Caribbean Writers, Cave Canem, and international poetry festivals throughout the Caribbean and the Americas. Her debut film, Womanish Ways, has also been widely screened throughout the Caribbean and across the United States at documentary film festivals, cultural centers, and universities.

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda from Zimbabwe is a trained human rights lawyer with extensive experience in conflict resolution and mediation.

For some twenty years, she has worked to advance women and children’s human rights, with a special focus on crisis countries and addressing issues of violence against women, peace with justice, property rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights and HIV. Since 2007, Gumbonzvanda has been the General Secretary of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women and girls in over 120 countries.

Prior to this, she served for ten years with the United Nations with UNICEF and UNIFEM and was a member of the UN Civil Society Advisory Group on 1325. She has previously worked with the Zimbabwe Women Lawyers Association and in the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs in Zimbabwe. Gumbonzvanda has a master’s degree in private law with specialisation in constitutional property law from the University of South Africa and completed postgraduate work on conflict resolution at Uppsala University, Sweden.

She serves on various boards of development organisations including Action Aid International and Save the Children UK and the steering committee for Girls Not Brides. Gumbonzvanda is also on the High Level Group on HIV Prevention and Sexual health for young people in Eastern and Southern Africa, advisor to the Dutch Government in the planning of the Human Rights Thematic Forum for ICPD+20 and currently serves as Chair of CIVICUS and the NGO Committee on the Status of Women in Geneva.

Robi is the Israeli spokesperson and Director of International Relations for the Parents Circle – Families Forum (PCFF), a group of 600 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost close family members to the conflict and who work together for reconciliation and a just resolution to the conflict. Robi’s son, David, was killed by a Palestinian sniper in March of 2002 while he was guarding a checkpoint near a settlement during his army reserve service. Since becoming active in the Parents Circle, Robi has spoken around the world, including to thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, to demand that reconciliation be a part of any peace agreement. Robi was named as a 2015 Woman of Impact by Women in the World. In 2014, Robi was selected by the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice as one of four Women PeaceMakers. She is the protagonist featured in the documentary, One Day after Peace. She regularly contributes to The Forward and Huffington Post, and has spoken at various Women in the World events, Royal Albert Hall with Marcus Mumford, and European, Spanish and Canadian Parliament.