Senior Education Policy Analyst, ActionAid International

Akanksha Marphatia holds a EdM in International Education Policy with emphasis on Girls & Women’s Education from Harvard University. She has technical, management, and policy experience in the field of girls’ and women’s education in West, North, and East Africa, and India, which includes managing projects and small grants; developing analytical tools to eliminate gender bias in education; designing monitoring and evaluation frameworks; conducting capacity building workshops to mainstream gender into policies and programs. She has worked with international and national groups: UNESCO, UNICEF, USAID, the World Bank, Ministries of Education and NGOs. Before ActionAid International, she worked for the Center for Research on Women (ICRW), in Washington, D.C., analyzing how young people and adults can partner to mitigate HIV/AIDS, promote girls’ education, and improve child protection.

Policy Analyst, ActionAid International USA

Rick Rowden joined ActionAid International USA with three years of policy research and advocacy experience. He has worked as a policy researcher and advocate with several DC-based international economic justice advocacy NGOs, including RESULTS and Jubilee USA, where he conducted research and advocacy on IMF and World Bank policy reforms jointly with many civil society organizations in the U.S., Europe, and throughout the Global South, including ActionAid. More recently, his policy work has focused on the linkages and policy coherence agreements between the IMF, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to gain a better understanding of how the overlapping policy agendas of these institutions impact global economic development and poverty eradication efforts.

Director of the Network Women's Program, Open Society Institute

Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck has 15 years of experience directing academic and advocacy programs focusing on women’s rights. In 1990–94 she served as a founding director of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies in the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was on the board of directors of the International Women’s Health Coalition (1994–2002) and serves on the advisory board of the Global Fund for Women (since 1993). Posadskaya-Vanderbeck was a member of the Yeltsin Presidential Commission on the Issues of Women, Family and Children (1993–95). In 1999–2000 she was awarded the Julian and Virginia Cornell Distinguished Visiting Professorship by Swarthmore College. She is co-editor of Women in Russia: A New Era in Russia's Feminism (1994), and A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (1998). Since 1997 Posadskaya-Vanderbeck has served as a Director of OSI's Network Women’s Program, with the mandate to integrate women’s rights programs in the international work of the Soros foundations. In this capacity she is responsible for development, monitoring, and implementation of international programs in about 30 countries in areas including Violence Against Women, Women’s/Gender Studies, Women’s Reproductive Rights, Media and Policy Analysis, European Integration, and Equal Opportunities. Since 2003 she has been on Task Force 3 of the Millennium Project, which focuses on the issues of Gender Equality and Education.

International Head - Women’s Rights, ActionAid International

Everjoice Win’s entire working life has been spent in the women's movement in Zimbabwe and the African continent, notably with the Women's Action Group, one of the few feminist organizations focusing on women's legal and health rights, and as Program Officer with Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), a pan-African women's rights NGO, using the law as a tool for development. She headed the Zimbabwe program of WiLDAF, spearheading the organization's participation in a number of international conferences that put African women's rights issues on the map. Everjoice served as a Commonwealth Advisor to the Commission on Gender Equality of South Africa; is a founder member of the National Constitutional Assembly of Zimbabwe; and served as spokesperson for the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition. She is also a Board member of Akina mama wa Afrika, Women and AIDS Support Network, the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID), and the Center for Civil Society at University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Everjoice is currently the International Head of Women's Rights with ActionAid International.