The IAC:
- Provides strategic advice, independent challenge, and quality assurance
- Champions the programme externally helping to raise its profile
- Uses their networks to identify opportunities and strategies for both components, including knowledge dissemination
Melissa Upreti is an internationally recognized human rights lawyer who has spent over two decades advancing gender equality and promoting accountability for human rights by using national, regional, and international law and mechanisms, and engaging with governments and civil society.
She has led mega-research projects and fact-finding missions, undertaken strategic litigation, built the capacity of civil society organizations and advised governments on legal and policy reform. Upreti served as Chair-Rapporteur of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, a Special Procedure of the Human Rights Council, from 2021-2022, and will complete her tenure in October 2023. She has been a Fellow in the University of Toronto Law Faculty’s International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program since 2017, and previously held the position of Senior Director of Program and Advocacy at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University (2017-2022,) where she conceptualized and led multi-year initiatives of the original Global 16 Days Campaign to End Gender-Based Violence and helped launch the Journalism Initiative on Gender-Based Violence (JiG). Prior to that she was Regional Director for Asia at the Center for Reproductive Rights, where she built and led the Asia program for 16 years (2000-2016) and, among other notable achievements, spearheaded the creation of the South Asia Reproductive Justice and Accountability Initiative (SARJAI), which has produced groundbreaking strategic litigation and legal precedents spurring law reform on reproductive rights in South Asia. Upreti is widely published and holds law degrees from India and the United States. Her professional experience and activism span the globe.
Kapwani Kavenuke is a lawyer by profession and Founder of Mojafam Organization which aims at the achievement of SDGs 1,5,10 and 13. As a survivor of Gender Based Violence, she is passionate about Women and Youth Empowerment. In her pursuits of her passion she is currently serving as United Nations Youth Delegate for Tanzania under the AUNYD Program, Youth Sounding Board Member for the European Union Delegation in Tanzania with a specific focus on violence against women and she is a steering committee member of the Tanzania Youth Organizations Coalition for Climate Change under UNEP & African Reflection Foundation.
Kapwani has previously served as Chairperson of the Youth Accountability Forum of Tanzania Under WAJIBU Institute, Vice President at St. Augustine University of Tanzania Mwanza and Climate Ambassador UNICEF Zambia.
Her remarkable contributions and leadership have been recognized through numerous accolades, including the Best Emerging Leader Nominee under Bethel Leadership Summit 2024, Rising Woman Award 2023 by Mwananchi Communications LTD and KPMG, Young Leader of the Year award (1st Runner Up) at the Tanzania Emerging Youth Awards 2022, Winner of the Tanzanian Catholic Universities Students Union (TACUSU) symposium competition in 2021 and 2022, Winner of the Human Rights Debate hosted by the Legal and Human Rights Center in 2021, and 3rd Runner Up for the National Moot Court Competition on International Humanitarian Law by the ICRC.
To know more about Kapwani and her works, visit her LinkedIn profile
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kapwani-kavenuke-52a700169/
Dr. Nahid Toubia, M.D. (Cairo University) FRCS (England), MPhil Health Planning Financing (University of London) is a researcher, practitioner and activist in the field of sexual reproductive justice. She started as the first woman surgeon in Sudan then moved to work internationally first with the Population Council in New York then as the Founder CEO of RINBO: Health Rights for African Women. She served as a technical advisor to WHO and several UN agencies, national governments in the North and South, the World Bank and was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia School of Public health and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She divides her time between London and Khartoum where she is the Director of the Institute for Reproductive Health and Rights of Sudan
Hannah Bond is Co-Director of Policy, Advocacy and Programmes at ActionAid UK.
She is former Director of Gender Action for Peace and Security (GAPS). Hannah has worked with CSOs and government in Europe and Sub Saharan Africa. In the early stages of her career, Hannah worked for the UK Government’s Women’s National Commission, focusing on Gender Based Violence. She has since worked for humanitarian and development NGOs in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa and for the British Embassy in Addis Ababa where she worked on Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland. She has specialised in conflict, peacebuilding, gender equality, human rights, emergency humanitarian response, and rights based approaches. Hannah focused on conflict and gender equality in her Masters degree at King’s College London.
Melinda Wells is Vice-President, Policy and Strategic Partnerships at the Equality Fund. She leads Equality Fund’s work with bilateral donors, relationships with key Philanthropic institutions and strategic partners including the African Women’s Development Fund. Melinda joined the Equality Fund in January, 2020 with over 20 years of humanitarian, gender and development experience. She began her career with the Center for Victims of Torture and consulted for several years with organizations including the World Bank and UNICEF in Latin America and the Caribbean. Following this, she held several positions with the Canadian Red Cross, including Director of Global Relations and Humanitarian Diplomacy, and led the humanitarian team for the UN Women Country Office for Jordan and Syria in 2013-2014. She holds Masters Degrees in Social Work and Public Policy, and lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe People, also known as Ottawa Canada.
Niluka Gunawardena is an educator, researcher, and activist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her understanding of disability is informed by her experience of multiple disabilities and intersectionality. Niluka Gunawardena is a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Disability Studies, University of Kelaniya. She has a MA in Disability and Gender, and she works as an independent consultant for several international organizations. She serves on the Board of Women Enabled International and on the advisory committees of ARROW, LIRNEasia and HYPE Sri Lanka, among others.
Dr Anusanthee Pillay is a gender specialist/advisor to national and international humanitarian and development sectors. Anu has also worked as an advisor and specialist on addressing violence against women in Southern, East, and West Africa and spent some time in India working on interfaith conflict. She has been seconded to the United Nations and deployed to the Pacific Islands, based in Fiji, Somalia, Nairobi, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Nepal, Nigeria. She has worked in Iraq as a gender-based violence (GBV) consultant, and as a visiting professor at the UN mandated University for Peace (UPeace) in Costa Rica to teach a Master’s level course on gender in humanitarian action.
Anu holds an MPhil degree in Conflict Management from the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, a postgraduate Certificate and a PhD in Humanitarian Affairs from the University of York in the UK. Anu has also studied psychology and is a life coach. Anu has a history of activist and academic engagement on Violence against Women in South Africa and presented the first study on Intimate Femicide at the Fourth UN World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing. She has published numerous journal articles on gender, peace and security and is co-editor of the book “The Aftermath: Women in Post Conflict Transformation” published in 2001 by Zed Books, London.
Renu Khanna has a Masters in Business Administration from Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, India. She is a founder trustee of a 39 year old organisation – SAHAJ-Society for Health Alternatives based in Vadodara (Gujarat, India). SAHAJ is engaged in community based action research and advocacy. And works on social accountability issues in the areas of Maternal Health, Child rights, Adolescents’ Development.
Renu was part of Shodhini a feminist women’s network who wrote Touch Me, Touch Me Not: Women, Plants and Healing published by Kali for Women. She has been part of collectives to design and conduct several pioneering courses like: Gender and Health, Gendered Research in Health Course, Researching Health Inequities, an online 7 module course on Gender Transformative Evaluations.
Renu was an Erasmus Mundus scholar and taught in KIT Amsterdam and QMU Edinburgh in 2008. More recently she taught a course on Gender, Health and Rights in Azim Premji University, India. She has co-edited Towards Comprehensive Women’s Health Policies and Programmes. Renu is on the governance structures of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (Indian chapter of Peoples Health Movement), CommonHealth – Coalition for Reproductive Health and Safe Abortion, Feminist Policy Collective (FPC), COPASAH (Community of Practitioners on Accountability and Social Action in Health), Health Equity Network India (HENI). She is a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission for Gender and Global Health 2020-23 and has recently been invited by the George Institute to be a Distinguished Fellow (2023-24).
Alessandra Nilo is a feminist journalist, with a postgraduate degree in Diplomacy and Trade Affairs. She is co-founder and general coordinator of Gestos– HIV and AIDS, Communication and Gender, an NGO created in 1993 in Brazil, which acts at local and international levels and has ECOSOC status from the UN. Currently Gestos is the elected Latin America Operative Partner for Women’s Major Group until the end of 2024.
In 2012 Alessandra was nominated to the High-Level Task Force of ICPD and followed all post-2015 negotiations. In Brazil she is the co-coordinator of the CSO Working Group for 2030 Agenda (GT SC A2030), a network with 65 members, created in 2014 and co-editor responsible for publishing the CSO Spotlight Report on the SDG Implementation in Brazil, now on its 7th edition.
Bridget Burns is the Executive Director of WEDO, Women’s Environment and Development Organization. She is a gender equality and climate justice expert.
She specializes in policy advocacy, research and movement building at the intersection of gender equality, women’s rights and environment/climate justice. She has been particularly focused on integrating gender equality into the decisions and outcomes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Bridget serves as the co-focal point of the Women and Gender Constituency, a UNFCCC stakeholder group of civil society organizations which support the political participation of women’s rights advocates in climate convention processes. She was among Apolitical’s list of 100 most influential people in gender policy in 2020.
Dr. Athalia Lesiba Molokomme is a lawyer by training whose forty-year career has spanned the academic, governmental, judicial, civil society and diplomatic spheres.
She holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Botswana and Swaziland, aMasters in Law from Yale Law School, and a PhD in Law from Leiden University. She also attained a Diploma in International Commercial Arbitration from the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIARB) in London, and is a Fellow of the CIARB.
She began her career as an academic, rising to the position of Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Botswana, where she authored and published a number of journal articles and book chapters on Human Rights, Gender Equality, Democracy and the Rule of Law, as well as participated as a speaker and resource person at many conferences, seminars and workshops for the past four decades.
Before serving as a Judge of the High Court of Botswana, she was appointed as the founding head of the SADC Gender Unit at the Secretariat, where she oversaw the setting up of a policy and institutional framework for gender in SADC.
Thereafter she served for 11 years as the first female Attorney General of the Republic of Botswana, and Principal Legal Advisor to the Government and ex-officio member of the Cabinet. In this role, she oversaw the Attorney Generals Chambers which provided legal advice to Government Ministries, drafted and vetted commercial and international agreements and represented them in legal proceedings.
She also led Botswana delegations to regional and international meetings held under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community, the African Union, the Commonwealth and the United Nations.
She has also contributed to the founding of a number of Human Rights Organisations at national, legal and international level, and currently serves on international boards including the Nuremberg Principles Advisory Council and Justice Rapid Response.
Dr Molokomme served as the Permanent Representative of Botswana to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva and Ambassador to Switzerland from May 2017-December 2024. In addition to her representational duties, she served on a number of key Committees in multilateral organisations including as Chairperson of the WTO Trade Policy Review Body in 2021; Co-Chair of the WTO Informal Working Group on Women and Trade; Chairperson of the ITC Joint Advisory Group for 2021; Chairperson of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body in 2022 and as Chairperson of the WTO General Council from March 2023 until March 2024.
She retired from the Botswana public service on 31 December 2024 and is currently operating as an independent consultant based in Gaborone, Botswana. On 5 March 2025, she was appointed as an Independent Non-Executive Director of Botswana Insurance Holdings Ltd, a leading financial services group listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange.
Dr Molokomme is the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including the Presidential Order of Meritorious Service for Exceptional service to Botswana in September 1999 and the Presidential Honor: “Naledi Ya Botswana” awarded forOutstanding Service to the Republic of Botswana in September 2024.
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