Co-authored by Gini Reticker

It is now two years since street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, triggering a revolution in Tunisia that led to the overthrow of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, then president, and a series of revolutions and political change throughout the Arab world. Women were...

"Hope is dying in Afghanistan."

These are the words of my colleague, Sweeta Noori, who directs Women for Women International's Afghanistan programs. These words from a woman who has seen it all: from socialist government, to Mujahidin rebels, to Taliban control. She has seen more than three decades of...

One hundred years ago, more than one million women and men attended rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland to celebrate the first anniversary of International Women's Day that inaugurated the year prior in Copenhagen. Their demands were for the right to vote, and work, to receive vocational training, and...

With the New Year, we may see a new country born through a referendum that will be held this weekend in Sudan. Today I'd like to share a word from Karak Mayik, my sister who heads Women for Women International's Sudan program and is everyday a hero striving for peace...

I don't think I have ever appreciated the mercy of God and the blessings of my life as much as I do today. I don't think I have ever realized how blessed I am for not experiencing hunger or being forced to make decisions that impacted my life or that...

This is the tale of two Iraqi women who grew up in the same household but were separated and unaware of each other's whereabouts for 20 years. They finally met through the charitable work of one and the poverty of the other.

The first woman is me, Zainab Salbi,...

Today I would like to tell you the story of Birtukan Mideksa, an Ethiopian prisoner of conscience who is facing life imprisonment for speaking out against an oppressive government. Birtukan is an opposition leader of the Unity for Democracy and Justice (formerly Coalition for Unity and Democracy) party and is...

My life has not been particularly long--I'm only 37--but already I have been a daughter, a mother, a leader, a war-survivor and three-times a refugee. As an Afghan woman I look back on my time on this earth and already I can see how much has changed for Afghanistan, even...

You've probably heard of the 1994 genocide that took 800,000 lives and witnessed up to 500,000 rapes in only 100 days. You may be less familiar with neighboring DR Congo, where the same roots of conflict have fostered a war more deadly than any since WWII, where hundreds of thousands...

Fifteen years ago, two countries that had witnessed the most horrible genocides in the last decade of the 20th century ended their wars: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda. Through my work with Women for Women International, I have been working in and visiting these countries for years. This year, I...

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing to shine light on the global epidemic of violence against women. Women for Women International submitted the following testimony to the Congressional Record offering 16 years of experience on how violence impacts women, their families and communities around the world...

I'm sitting by the Tigris River in Baghdad on a hot July evening. The air is still, the dust has settled, and the call for prayers is echoing over the river as it reflects lights from relatively new restaurants. I visited my mother's grave yesterday and learned that her tombstone...

I spent my twenty-fourth birthday in the refugee camps in Split, Croatia. The camps were filled with Bosnian refugees from a war that lasted four years, killed a minimum of 250,000 people and led to the rape of between 20-50,000 women. I had recently founded my organization, Women for Women...

In 1951, Ali Al-Wardi, one of Iraq's most respected historians and social anthropologists, wrote about the need to lift women's seclusion and the necessity of women's full inclusion in all aspects of the public life in Iraq. He argued that gender equality was one of the major prerequisites for a...

Today I would like to bring you the story of my friend and colleague Sweeta Noori, an Afghan woman working with me to empower women survivors of war through Women for Women International's Afghanistan Chapter. Through her life we see how, despite decades of political shifts in Afghanistan, the symbolic...

By Sara Sykes
Women for Women International

In the Women for Women International headquarters office in Washington DC, I sit in a small office everyday.
I type on my computer.
I answer the phone.
I rush down the hall, eager to finish a...

Throughout Afghanistan's history, negotiations over women's status and
rights in Afghan society have occurred largely in the context of political
struggles to take power or to hold on to power. We can see from President
Karzai's recent authorization of the Shiite Personal Status Law--a move
pleasing...

We all can feel it. Between the financial crisis and a looming recession sits the fear of worse things to come. It makes even those among us who have not yet felt the pinch of it think twice about whether we can afford to spend.

I am deeply worried...

I hadn't been to my homeland, Iraq, since so many professional Iraqi women started to be assassinated, including one of my good female friends, in fall of 2004. In February I traveled the country to visit with Women for Women International's courageous Iraqi staff -- who have served nearly 4,000...

Tensions continue to build in the Balkans and the threat of conflict looms. The UN deadline of December 10th has come and gone and negotiations over Kosovo's future are still deadlocked. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that once again negotiations impacting the future of an entire region have failed...