The Board

Aruna Rao is a leading international expert on gender equality, feminist leadership and organizational transformation.  She is the co-founder and former executive Director of Gender at Work, an international feminist network committed to building cultures of equality and inclusion in organizations and movements. 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, especially on gender transformative institutional change, with leadership and management to forge equitable and sustainable outcomes for women and girls. 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 gender transformative 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 successfully overseen the growth and development of key international human rights and civil society networks: she currently chairs the board of the Nobel Women’s Initiative; she has chaired the Boards of the Association of Women’s Rights in Development, and Civicus, and led the work on feminist practice and safeguarding as a member of the Board of Action Aid International. She has effectively forged alliances between feminist and social justice organizations and national and multilateral development institutions to further gender equality and development goals, and developed and led learning and knowledge networks linking development practitioners in South-North knowledge exchanges.

She co-hosts the Gender at Work podcast, Rethinking Feminist Transformational Strategies(www.genderatworkpodcast.org). Among her publications are Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21^stCentury Organizations (Routledge, 2016), Advancing Gender Equality in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2017), and Gender at Work: Organizational Change for Equality (Kumarian Press, 1999). She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Columbia University, New York.

She has co-developed a very successful 5-day course on Transformational Leadership for Gender Equality under the auspices of UN Women for senior managers in the multilateral, public and private organizations (including UN organizations, OAS, DFID and African educational unions in the UN Girls Education Initiative). She is currently a lead trainer in the SOAS-Gender at Work led “Transformative Leaders for Gender Equality in UNDP Program” focused on UNDP Resident Coordinators (2021-2022). She has also developed and taught MA courses on gender equality and institutional change at the University of Sussex, UK., and at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

Julienne Lusenge is from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A tireless and intrepid advocate for justice, peace and gender equality, she founded two separate NGOs. In 2001, she became the co-founder and president of the Female Solidarity for Peace and Integral Development (SOFEPADI), an NGO that works for the promotion of women and girls rights and on sexual and reproductive health in eastern DRC. Born out of the need for broader advocacy for women's rights, she created the Congolese Women's Fund (FFC) in 2007 and serves as the organization's executive director. The FFC works on six distinct but overlapping pillars of advocacy: women's empowerment, women's political leadership, conflict transformation, sexual and reproductive health / HIV / AIDS, climate justice, and protection of the environment, and sexual and gender-based violence. She is a member of the International Campaign to End Rape and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict Zones and is vice-president of the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). 

On 8 February 2023 Julienne was awarded the honourable mention for the Félix Houphouët-Boigny-UNESCO Peace Prize for her long-time commitment to the women who are victims of sexual violence in North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for keeping a bright spotlight on women's and girls' situations in the DRC, and for advocating tirelessly for peace and for women's inclusion in peacebuilding processes.

The Félix Houphouët-Boigny UNESCO Peace Prize is intended to honour living individuals and active public or private bodies or institutions that have made a significant contribution to promoting, seeking, safeguarding or maintaining peace, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations and the Constitution of UNESCO.

Dr. Denis Mukwege said of her: “You defend women's human rights and the scourges of sexual violence that is a method of warfare when women's bodies become a battlefield…a woman on the ground who not only responds to the needs of victims but also contributes to their empowerment." 

Ms. Lusenge received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur of France in 2013, the Ginetta Sagan award from Amnesty International in 2016, the international award for women's rights in 2018 from the Geneva Summit for human rights and democracy, and was chosen as one of the 100 most influential people on global gender politics in 2019 by Apolitical. In early 2020, she was recognized by the United Nations as the first of twenty "Women to Watch", published in United Nations News under the headline "Twenty Women on the Front Page of United Nations News in 2019". (" Twenty women on the front page of UN news in 2019. ” Currently a member of the High Panel in charge of supporting his EM Félix Antoine Tshisekedi President of the DRC in the DRC-AU mandate for the 2021-2022 fiscal year, in this High Panel, Madame Julienne is in charge of issues of Women, Peace and Security, good governance, democracy, elections, Human Rights and contacts with Civil Society. She is the 2021 laureate of the Women of Courage Award from the United States Department of State. Recipient of the 2021 I-Angel Prize and the ICIP Prize, she has been proclaimed the winner of the 2021 Aurora Prize.

Dr. Goetz served at the United Nations between 2005 and 2014 as a Policy Director of Governance, Peace and Security, at UNIFEM and UN Women.

From 1991 – 2005 she was a Professorial Fellow in Political Science at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. She also served the United Nations Development Program in Chad and Guinea in the mid-1980s.

While at the UN, Dr. Goetz spearheaded initiatives to build women’s participation in representative politics, to promote women’s empowerment in the UN’s peace building work in post-conflict situations, and to support the participation of women leaders and rights organizations in peace talks and post-conflict decision-making. She worked with the UN Security Council to improve responses to sexual violence in conflict, and to build peacekeepers’ capacities to prevent these abuses. Dr. Goetz is the author of seven books on the subjects of gender, politics and policy in developing countries, and on accountability reforms – including the 2009 volume: Governing Women: Women in Politics and Governance in Developing Countries, and the UNIFEM flagship report: Who Answers to Women? Gender and Accountability.

Dildar Kaya is passionate about advancing sustainable development through promoting mental health, women’s rights, and minority rights.

Her social and political interests have led her to work with various organizations such as the German Children and Youth Foundation, the Turkish Human Rights Association, Oxfam, UNICEF Bremen, and SEED Foundation.

Equipped with an educational background in Psychology, Dildar has worked on social justice issues and gender equality with marginalized women and youth in Europe. After relocating to Iraqi Kurdistan, she spent the last years working on access to Mental Health services and the recovery of survivors of conflict with a special focus on survivors of ISIS, sexual and gender-based violence, and the Syrian conflict.

Dildar Kaya is a One Young World Ambassador and holds a fellowship from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. In addition, she is a fellow of the transatlantic program for young minority leaders by the Johns Hopkins Universities American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.

Ertha Doliscar currently works at CARE Canada as Director, Corporate Finance. She has over 20 years of experience working in accounting and Finance field. She has worked in both Private and non-for-profit sector. She brings extensive experience in the areas of financial accounting, reporting, budgeting, risk management and strategic business advice.

Prior to joining CARE Canada in 2005, she has worked at CARE Haiti for nine years as Budget Manager. She has worked at Bank of Canada for two years as Senior Analyst and then she joined University of Ottawa in 2012 as Manager, Financial Planning and Analysis (Faculty of Medicine), she returned to CARE Canada in 2014.

She holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa. She is a CPA; CMA and she is fluently bilingual (French/English).

Previously, she has served as Treasurer for Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCTEVAW) Board. Ertha is very happy to join NWI Board, as she believes that she can use her skills and qualifications to help NWI reaching its objectives.