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building a
better world
for women
solutions to global
women's rights challenges
about
Lina AbiRafeh
I am committed to building a
better world for women!
I am a global women’s rights expert and gender equality advocate with decades of experience worldwide.
I am an activist, an academic, and an aid worker with a 25-year track record in creating positive change for women in over 20 countries around the world - Afghanistan, Haiti, Central African Republic, Papua New Guinea, and more.
I serve a range of organizations in a senior advisory capacity, including the Arab Institute for Women at the Lebanese American University, where I was Executive Director for many years.
I sit on various international boards - SheDecides, the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, the Global Women’s Institute, and others.
I speak and publish frequently on a range of women’s issues – on global stages and in the international media.
I’ve received various awards and recognitions including the Gender Equality Top 100 worldwide in 2018 and 2019, a Vital Voices fellowship and a Women’s Media Center Progressive Women’s Voice in 2021, and a Women inPower fellowship in 2022.
TALKS
Equality for women… what will it take?
Women are half of the world’s population, but continue to be the majority of the world’s poor, kept from basic education, forced into marriage, marginalized in the working world, underrepresented in every aspect of public life, and denied rights to their own bodies and lives. Armed with shocking statistics and powerful anecdotes built from over two decades of firsthand experience in some of the world’s most challenging countries, Lina AbiRafeh makes a strong case for women – and how we all have a role to play in building a better world.
Making the case for inclusion of women
There are 3.7 billion women in the world, but full inclusion of women still has not been achieved. No country in the world has full gender equality. At the present pace, it will take 120 years for women to achieve education, health, and political and economic parity with men. We pay a high price for inequality – as individuals, communities, countries, corporations. Now more than ever, we hold our institutions to account, ensuring that the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion is met by actual representation. Lina AbiRafeh brings experience and evidence to make the indisputable case for women’s inclusion.
Lead like a woman
The world – and the challenges it brings - are not gender-neutral. Therefore, our leadership and solutions can not be gender-neutral. Lina AbiRafeh builds on decades of experience to bring an understanding of gendered impacts of various challenges and highlighting the gendered dynamics of leadership. Sharing her global experiences from over twenty countries, she makes the case for women in leadership as a driver of peace and progress.
TESTIMONIALS
Lina is a force and energy to be reckoned with!
Deya' Leonard Dresner
Executive Director, Leonard Education Organization
To say that Lina AbiRafeh is a pioneer in the field would be an understatement. She wrote the manual! In her work in over 20 countries spanning over two decades, she truly has a global platform. She is not only committed to changing the daily lives of women across the world, she uses her access and privilege to ensure it is heard by policy makers to create lasting and sustainable change. I am proud to list myself in solidarity as one of Lina AbiRafeh's many women change agents.
Founder, Across Red Lines
Wow that was just a super inspiring webinar from Lina. She has touched on so many topics at once, intersecting them and addressing so many layers of “response-ability”, and contexts while giving concrete examples... thank you for making it happen.
Sophie Rousseau
Journalist
Lina isn't just a world class compelling speaker, she is a reagent. Someone who is integral to the very thinking and action in the field of woman's rights. She will tell it like it is, with a heath dose of wit and pull together the right people, in the right place and time to make phenomenal change happen.
Founding Board Member She Decides and Director of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, EngenderHealth
Thank you so much for the fabulous talk! It was wonderful to hear you speak live! Our participants were thrilled to learn from your experiences and I believe many will take your messages forward and implement them in their daily lives - I know I will!
Maria Milenova
Young Professionals in Foreign Policy
Lina incorporates light moments to present the topic and speakers, and a bit of humor - this made the audience present alert and attentive, beside the importance of the topic!
Rozan Naji
United Nations
Thank you for being a voice of female empowerment - and for helping me continue to find my own voice as I listened to you.
Mimi Jenkinson
Australia
Thank you for your voice, for your views, and for fighting every single day!
Dr. Lina AbiRafeh presents informed, deep, insightful and topical analysis on global equality, owing to her excellent and diverse experience coupled with her broad research work at the academic level, setting her apart as a strategic speaker, fully captivating diverse audiences.
Njoki Kinyanjui
United Nations
Dr. AbiRafeh hits you hard with the harsh reality that faces women's lives. Pointed, eloquent, with heart and wit, she brings home the message - that violence is so pervasive in women's lives and, to change that, all of society must change - its people and institutions.
April Pham
United Nations
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