Announcement: An Interim NWI Board of Directors has been appointed

Aruna Rao, Interim Board Chair

Aruna Rao is a globally recognized expert on gender equality, development and women’s rights.  In her over 40 years of experience particularly in Asia and Africa, Dr. Rao has combined advocacy and cutting-edge research on gender equality and development with leadership and management to forge better development results for women and men. In 2001, she co-founded and for 17 years led, Gender at Work, an international, feminist network committed to ending discrimination against women and advancing cultures of equality. Early in her career, she pioneered new approaches to gender equality and institutional change working in BRAC in Bangladesh. In 2002, she co-created the widely used Gender at Work Analytical Framework which illustrates the interlinkages between various domains of change and highlights discriminatory social norms and deep structures that are held in place by power dynamics in organizations and communities. Over the course of her career, she has worked at multiple levels – from global level advocacy initiatives including on UN reform and gender and democratic governance and global evaluations of gender mainstreaming, to institutional change efforts in national and international development organizations, to research on human rights and institutional change, public sector reform and on implementing gender equality policies and practices in private sector companies, to grassroots engagements with rural poor women.  She has chaired the Boards of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. Most recently she has co-developed and taught courses for UN Women and master’s courses on transformational leadership for gender equality. She co-hosts the Gender at Work podcast series, Rethinking Feminist Transformational Strategies (www.genderatworkpodcast.org). Among her publications are Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations (Routledge, 2016), Advancing Gender Equality in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2017), and Gender at Work: Organizational Change for Equality (Kumarian Press, 1999).

Roberta Clark, Member

Roberta Clarke is an activist for social justice and gender equality. She is the Chair, Executive Committee, International Commission of Jurists, and Chair of the Coalition against Domestic Violence, Trinidad and Tobago. She has led UN Women Regional Offices in East and Southern Africa, Asia Pacific, and the Caribbean. Prior to her career at the United Nations, she was a lawyer in Trinidad and Tobago. Roberta Clarke has extensive experience with international and national human rights organisations and in civil society engagement. She has written on violence against women in the Caribbean, human rights, law and development. She is married with four children.

Sarah Jewell, Member

Sarah Jewell is the Executive Director of Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa-USA, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to building a global community of support for education and peacebuilding in Liberia. Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa-USA also shares the teachings of Leymah Gbowee who has dedicated her life to women’s rights and peacebuilding and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.

Sarah Jewell is an experienced policy advisor and advocate with a particular interest in women’s rights, youth affairs, and social justice. She is from Australia where she worked in the non-profit sector, in the Australian civil service and as the National Policy and Research Director of Anglicare Australia, a network of over 30 social service agencies across Australia.
She has a Masters of Philosophy in International Peace Studies from Trinity College Dublin where she specialized in peace, feminist theory and human rights.

Dilar Kaya, Member

Dildar Kaya is passionate about advancing sustainable development through promoting mental health, women’s rights, combating GBV, and promoting minority and human rights. Her social and political interests have led her to work with various organizations such as Oxfam, the German Children and Youth Foundation, the Turkish Human Rights Association, UNICEF, and SEED Foundation.

She is currently working as a Senior Program Officer for a developmental organization in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq on promoting social, educational, and economic development and humanitarian assistance. With an educational background as a Psychologist, her current emphasis lies in the recovery and reintegration of ISIS survivors and ensuring adequate access to Mental Health services in the KRI.
Dildar Kaya is a One Young World Ambassador and holds a fellowship from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. Besides, she is a fellow of the transatlantic program for young minority leaders by the Johns Hopkins Universities American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.

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