All Sides of the Story—Voices of Women Activists from the Middle East and North Africa

Amal Mahmoud serves in Cairo as the Regional Advisor to the V-Day Karama Program, addressing strategies to end violence against women in the Arab world. A development expert and trainer, in 2002 and 2003 Mahmoud ran a series of Oxfam GB-Yemen workshops, engaging civil society organizations to examine an Arab training guide focusing on violence against women and domestic violence. Mahmoud is the Secretary General of the Forum of Women Development Associations, a network of 105 NGOs in Egypt, and the coordinator of the CEDAW NGO Coalition. She led the participation of Egyptian NGOs in the Beijing+5 assessment following the 1995 UN World Conference on Women. As Chairperson of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, Mahmoud advocated for the ratification of CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) by Arab governments to protect the rights of Arab women against discrimination. Amal Mahmoud earned a BS in Commerce and Accounting at Ains Shams University in Egypt, where she was the Secretary of the Cultural & Politics Club, responsible for the Rescue & Nursery Training during the October 73 War, and president of the Ain Shams Fatat Association.

In 1992, Azza Kamel founded Appropriate Communication Techniques, a training NGO in Cairo of which she remains the director. As a result, over the past 16 years she has worked frequently as a Social Development and Gender consultant in both developing and industrialized countries, conceptualizing, planning, implementing, and evaluating projects and technical assistance on gender and women’s issues in addition to human rights, communication, community health, nutrition education, and environment issues. Kamel has extensive experience in designing training programs, monitoring and evaluation techniques, as well as qualitative social science needs assessments. Her collaborations and projects have served GTZ, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), Save the Children USA (SCF), Near East Foundation (NEF), Catholic Relief Services, plus UNICEF, NEF, UNDP, SCF, Ford Foundation, IPPF, CEDPA, Egyptian Swiss Development Fund, and the Social Fund for Development. Kamel is completing a Ph.D. in Civic Education on "Developing civic education practices in Egypt in the light of contemporary international experience, a comparative study," and has earned diplomas in Mathematics, Astronomy, Computer Science, and Education, plus Certificates in Health Communications and Gender Policy and Planning. She is a member of V-Day Karama's Egypt group and steering committee.

After five years as a researcher at the Center for Research, Studies, Documentation and Information on Women (CREDIF), Fethia Saidi is today an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University El Manar and the University La Mannouba in Tunis. At present she is collaborating with UNIFEM and AFTURD on a project about sexual harassment in Tunisia. In addition to university teaching, Saidi is completing an additional master’s degree in contemporary philosophy studying the “State and International Civil Society in the Globalization Era.” From 2001 to 2006, Saidi was the producer and presenter on National Tunisian Radio of a social radio program tackling hundreds of topics related to women's and children's rights, based on live debates on subjects such as AIDS, Drugs, Violence, and Smoking. Over her career, she has earned training certificates in Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, and Germany, and worked regularly as a trainer for gender advocacy, human rights, and good governance. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Arab Association of Sociologists and the Tunisian Women Association for Research and Development, in charge of research and training.

Saadia Wadah earned a law degree from Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco. She is a member of the National Council of Morocco’s Human Rights Organizations, serves on the Coordinating Committee of the Arab Women Court, and leads the Moroccan Association to Combat Violence Against Women. Wadah regularly writes articles for national newspapers and the Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc about the new Personal Status Law, women’s rights, and marriage and divorce laws. The Family Code and Personal Status Laws were significantly revised in 2004, improving women’s legal rights particularly in marriage. As a gender trainer, Wadah has run workshops and seminars about providing legal assistance at Morocco’s 50 counseling centers for victims of violence, and about the changes in the new Personal Status Code. The new law raised the minimum age for marriage to 18, puts the family under the joint responsibility of the husband and the wife instead of the husband only, curbs the submission of women to guardianship by a male member of the family, and gives women the right to initiate divorce proceedings.