Maria Bello

Maria Bello is an internationally renowned actor, women’s rights activist, DWAG board member and the co-founder of We Advance, a women’s movement and NGO based in Cité Soleil, Haiti, that advocates for women throughout the country to have full political, economic, and social participation. In conjunction with the movement, she also founded the website We Advance University to connect and empower women in Haiti and throughout the world.

With Golden Globes and years of experience with human rights issues, Bello founded her first NGO, The DreamYard Drama Project, in 1997 and travelled around the world to Bosnia, Kenya, Botswana, Bhutan, Nepal, and many other countries. Bello began her career as an activist at Villanova University, where she majored in peace and justice education and worked at the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia.

Niemat Ahmadi

A native of North Darfur, Sudan, Niemat Ahmadi is Founder and President of Darfur Women Action Group and the former Director of Global Partnerships for United to End Genocide. Ms. Ahmadi previously worked for the Save Darfur Coalition as a member of the coalition’s policy and government relation team. She is a founding member of the Darfuri Leaders Network, a coalition of over twenty U.S.-based Darfuri organizations working to promote peace and security in Darfur. She served as advisor at the seventh round of inter-Sudanese Darfur peace talks in Abuja, Nigeria in 2006.

A veteran human rights advocate, Ms. Ahmadi worked with international NGOs in various fields of emergency and development with a focus on women’s empowerment and capacity-building while in Sudan, including Oxfam Great Britain, Intermediate Technology Development Group (currently Practical Action), and the UN’s World Food Program. She also served as an executive member of the Darfur Assessment Mission, a consortium of six Sudanese NGOs in Khartoum, Sudan working on documenting human rights violations in Darfur at the time of the crises. Ms. Ahmadi led the Darfur Diaspora Association of East Africa in Kenya. She also participated in many regional forums, including but not limited to, African women conference for peace and security, and Sudanese women forum for peace.

While in college, Niemat established Darfur call for private education that seeks scholarships and raises funds to support the education of poor Darfurian students. She was also a founding member of the Darfur Student Association at Ahfad University, which seeks to secure scholarships and help students from Darfur receive tuition waivers. She was forced to leave her country after two attempts on her life because of her role in helping victims and being vocal about massive human rights abuses and the genocide in Darfur.

In 2007, Niemat received a fellowship from Ford Motor Company for leadership. She has been recognized by former President George W. Bush as one of the eight global human rights fighters for freedom of their people of the year in 2008.

While in the U.S., Niemat has traveled to over 24 states to tell her personal story and the stories of many other victims of the Darfur genocide to educate the American people about the current genocide in Darfur. Niemat has also testified about the Darfur genocide and the use of rape as a weapon of war before the UN Security Council, the UN Human Rights Council, the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee and many international conferences.

Ms. Ahmadi earned an M.S. In Sustainable Development and a B.A. in Psychology and Pre-school Education from Ahfad University for Women in Khartoum.

Asiya Daud

Asiya Daud received her PhD in political science from Claremont Graduate University. She has lived and traveled to the Middle East, and was in Cairo, Egypt, during the climax of the Egyptian Revolution. She is a professor of international relations/Middle East politics at the American University and The University of California, Irvine. Dr. Asiya Daud frequently appears in the media providing Middle East Analysis.

Hawa Mohamed Abdalla

Hawa Abdallah Mohammed Salih is a Sudanese activist. She was born in North Darfur but had to leave due to fighting between government forces and Darfuri rebels. She moved to Abu Shouk internally displaced persons camp, where she worked with United Nations officials and the American NGO IRC to spread information and awareness about the conditions in the camp.

For her work she was arrested three times, and kidnapped twice by National Security and detained, including a time in 2011 when she was held for two months and tortured and raped in a state prison in Khartoum. She had to flee Sudan in 2011. She received a 2012 International Women of Courage award.

Fatou Bensouda

Fatou B. Bensouda is a Gambian lawyer, former advisor of Yahya Jammeh, international criminal law prosecutor and legal adviser.

She has been the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor since June 2012, after having served as a Deputy Prosecutor in charge of the Prosecutions Division of the ICC since 2004 and having been minister of justice of the Gambia. She has held positions of Legal Adviser and Trial Attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Bensouda has been the recipient of various awards, most notably, the distinguished ICJ International Jurists Award (2009), which was presented by President of India P.D, Patil. Bensouda was given this award for her contributions to criminal law both at the national and International level. Bensouda has also been awarded the 2011 World Peace Through Law Award presented by the Whitney Harris World Law Institute, Washington University, which recognized her work in considerably advancing the rule of law and thereby contributing to world peace.

Ambassador Melenne Verveer

Ambassador Verveer most recently served as the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, a position to which she was nominated by President Obama in 2009. She coordinated foreign policy issues and  activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women, traveling to nearly sixty countries. She worked to ensure that women’s participation and rights are fully integrated into U.S. foreign policy, and she played a leadership role in the Administration’s development of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. President Obama also appointed her to serve as the U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

From 2000-2008, she was the Chair and Co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international NGO that she co-founded to invest in emerging women leaders. During the Clinton administration, she served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady. She also led the effort to establish the President’s Interagency Council on Women, and was instrumental in the adoption of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. She is the co-author of Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose (2015).

Ambassador Verveer has a B.S. and M.S. from Georgetown University. In 2013, she was the Humanitas Visiting professor at the University of Cambridge. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Bank Advisory Council on Gender and Development. She holds several honorary degrees and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the U.S. Secretary of State’s Award for Distinguished Service.

Tanotamon Gerais

Tanotamon Gerais is a board member of Voices for Sudan, an organization which works to give a voice to the Sudanese diaspora community and help end the political crisis.

Mr. Gerais is also the co-founder of Nubia Project, an organization which advocates for the protection of Nubian artifacts and culture against the flooding due to the building of dams by the government of Sudan.

Mr. Gerais has participated and attended prestigious events numerous times, at the US State Department, US Congress, and Hudson Institute.  He has spoken at many colleges and universities on the topic of Kush Heritage in order to help bring more attention to the issue as well as educating the younger generation on a topic which is not widely discussed in the classroom.

Emira Woods

Emira Woods is the Global Client Principal for Social Impact Programs at Thought Works, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice. She is an expert on US foreign policy toward Africa and the developing world at large.

She is a former co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies (ISP). Prior to joining IPS, she was program manager for the Committee on Development Policy and Practice at InterAction, serving as a principal staff contact for advocacy at the UN, the international financial institutions, USAID and Treasury. Previous to that, she served as a program officer of Oxfam America’s Africa program.

Ms. Woods regularly appears on CNN’s Your World Today, BBC’s The World Today, Aljazeera and the Voice of America commenting on issues related to U.S. foreign policy and social and political justice. She has also written, and continues to write, on issues of debt, trade and development, social justice and financial policy.

Emira earned her undergraduate degree from Columbia University and graduate degree at Harvard.