I have come to understand that in order to effectively advance women's rights, we need to galvanize a global women's movement.
No change can come if those who are impacted the most by discrimination are not willing to stand up for themselves.
Do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life?
I believe that there is an urgent need to restructure the discussion of war to include the impact it has on women.
I dont want to be someone in my sixties holding on to a group that I created when I was in my twenties.
Since a very young age, my mother made sure to tell me about the plight of women... As she raised my awareness about women's issues, she also made sure to ingrain in me the importance of being strong and independent and not to let anybody define me by their images of what women should be.
I don't have a child, so Women for Women is like my child. But I always said I would step down after 20 years. I didn't want to be a 60-year-old woman holding on to something I created when I was 23.
I believe that leadership acts should be manifested by engaging in external work that can be observed and shared with everyone else.
Since war often enters homes through the "kitchen door," we need to understand women's attempts to keep life going in the face of shortage of food, closing of schools and reduced freedoms.
Leadership is about encouraging women to break their silence and tell their stories to the world.
If half the society isn't engaged on any number of sectors, success and potential will be limited. In that sense, I do definitely believe there is a growing movement and moment for women's issues.
From joblessness to lack of education and professional skills to sexual and gender-based violence, women face a multi-faceted oppression.
Passionately enjoy life!
Working with women survivors of war has taught me that we need to listen to women's perspectives on war in order to understand how to effectively rebuild a country, a community and a family.
I grew up with injustice and could do nothing about it. But once in America, I had freedom of choice.
I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly — though not exclusively — who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table.
One year of the world’s military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women.
Where has change ever been clean and nice? It has always been messy and painful.
I learned that victims come in all image - some raped, some witnessing an act of violence, some losing loved ones. I learned that the solutions come by both listening to the people impacted by the crisis and by learning from historical experiences in other places.
Only 8 percent of peace talks have included women at any level.
Women have never been a chief negotiator in any UN-sponsored talks.
I believe that a lot of progress has been achieved to address gender inequality: We have moved from a time where women in the US could not apply for credit card without their husband's signature to a time where women are the owners of their businesses.
From an economic perspective, women are treated unfairly: they perform 66 percent of the world's work and produce 50 percent of the food but they only earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property.
Women in the Arab world have a rich history in their active participation in political change from the Algeria revolution against the French occupation to the most recent revolution in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya among other countries. The question is not their participation. Their question is the incorporation of women's voices fully in the new definitions of the countries where change has happened.
Growing up under Saddam's rule, I witnessed many injustices occurring everyday in my country and yet I could not do anything to prevent them.
