profiles

We are proud to honor the work of these amazing women and their outstanding advocacy for women's rights in the Third World.

awardees

Naw Zipporah Sein,
Karen Women's Organization
(2007 PERDITA HUSTON HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD RECIPIENT)

Samar Minallah,
Ethnomedia
(2007 Perdita Huston Activist for Human Rights)

Bishnu Maya Pariyar,
Empower Dalit Women of Nepal
(2007 Perdita Huston Activist for Human Rights)

Sunitha Krishnan,
Prajwala
(2006 PERDITA HUSTON HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD RECIPIENT)

Ranjana Gaur,
Social Action Research Center
(2005 PERDITA HUSTON HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD RECIPIENT)

Fatoumata Traoré,
Association for Development and Population Activities (ASDAP)
(2004 PERDITA HUSTON HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD RECIPIENT)

Dr. Sima Samar,
The Shuhada Organization
(2003 PERDITA HUSTON HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD RECIPIENT)

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nominees

2006

Hauwa Ibrahim, Nigeria
- As the first female lawyer from northern Nigeria , Ms Ibrahim has come to the defense of numerous women who were accused of adultery and sentenced to death. Without her help, countless women may have been stoned to death. She has also defended dozens of men accused of theft and sentenced to amputation. She has been providing these services free of charge to support poor people who are harassed by an unjust legal systems and the Sharia, Islamic law that often serves as the criminal code. Ms. Ibrahim grew up in a small, traditional village and is a rare example of a girl who was educated beyond the primary level. Her numerous accomplishments include being featured in a BBC documentary, awarded a Humphrey Fellowship at American University College of Law, a recipient of the American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award and Victor Folsom Fellow of the Academy of American and International Law. In addition, she has served as the National Publicity Secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association.
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Annie Joseph, India
- Ms. Joseph is the founder of Ankur Kala , a center that provides support and skills training so women are able to break out of "poverty and oppression and lead lives of dignity and hope." Based in West Bengal, India, Ankur Kala is currently providing training to 150 single or abandoned, orphaned or widowed, and victimized women who develop skills of tailoring, catering, batik dye design, food preparation and silk screen printing. In addition to these efforts that allow women to become self employed, Ankur Kala is providing social empowerment training and assists other NGOs. Recently it has also focused on assistance to women from rural areas who are more vulnerable to trafficking and HIV AIDS. It continues to grow and "sow seeds of hope" to growing populations of marginalized and destitute women throughout the area.
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Molly Melching, Senegal
- Ms. Melching founded TOSTAN in Senegal "to contribute to the human dignity of African people through the implementation of a human rights-based, non-formal, participatory education program in national languages. Tostan provides participants with the knowledge and skills needed to become confident, resourceful actors in - and instigators of - social transformations." Through Tostan trainings and community mobilization, results include abandonment of the traditional practice of Female Genital Cutting, child marriage, empowerment of women, basic literacy, microcredit projects and lots more. Its 30-month Community Empowerment Program uses teaching methods based on oral traditions of song and debate as well as song and dance.
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Layli Miller-Muro, U.S.A
- Ms. Layli Miller-Muro is a passionate advocate for human rights - especially the rights of women and girls. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Tahirih Justice Center , which is dedicated to promoting justice for women and girls worldwide by providing escape for some to find asylum in other countries and legal counsel for those who find their way to the US . Based in Virginia , USA , the Center also provides protection for those who arrive in the US and find abuse here as well. As an attorney at Arnold & Porter in Washington , DC , she provides substantial pro bono support. As a law student, she argued before the Immigration Judge related to a high profile cases involving a women's rights to receive refuge in the US from the tribal practice of female genital mutilation. She has written books and articles about the human rights abuses of women worldwide and was the recipient of the Feminist Majority Foundation Award, Africa 's Children Fund Award, Voices of Courage Media Award among other recognitions.
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Shruti Nagvanshi and Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi, India
- This married couple started the People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights as a way to construct a community based organization that addresses the injustice of the India caste system. The approach of the organization is two-fold: to have a strong grassroots organization to work for democratic rights of those in marginalized communities and secondly, to create the structure and dynamics to receive the assistance of national and international institutions. Although both were born into high castes, they have spent their lives - often at great risk - fighting for the rights of all. This "peoples' forum" is located the Uttar Pradesh region of India . Even though there have been laws against treating people as "untouchables" for decades, the practice persists and PVCHR is an important force for change.
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Laiden Pedrina, Philippines
- The Young Artists Fellowship for the Environment (YAFE) is a community-based organization of rural youth engaged in environmental advocacy through the arts. Through providing free environmental and art workshops to rural and disadvantaged communities, YAFE develops the artistic skills of rural youth in the fields of the performing and visual arts and in creative writing. YAFE encourages participating youth to use the arts to advocate for environmental causes, opens venues for youth to showcase their talents, and facilitates partnerships with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to preserve the environment. Originally based in the province of Laguna , YAFE now has chapters in the provinces of Ifugao and Camarines Sur. Its flagship project is the Enviro-art Workshop, an integration of YAFE's environmental and art workshops. Laiden Pedrina was awarded a International Youth Foundation YouthActionNet award to buy musical instruments and art materials needed by rural youth. Says Laiden: "Most rural youth would like to develop their talents in the arts. However, the workshops provided in the market are expensive. YAFE believes that arts are for everyone.. [We] conduct projects that will open the door of opportunity for the rural youth to join art workshops for free."
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Iqballe Rogova, Kosovo
- Igo Rogova has challenged oppression and created new opportunities for women in the worst of times. During the decade of underground government and during the war, she created the first rural, community-based advocacy organization, Motrat Qirias, run by and for women in the remote region of Has. The group is named for the Qiriazi sisters who were the first Albanian women to be educated 100 years ago. MQ opened libraries in villages, produced radio shows for rural women, engaged the village "fathers" in educating their daughters, established a voucher program for older girls to go the nearby secondary schools, opened the first women's health clinic and trained village women and teachers to become activists for their rights.
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Anjana Shakya, Nepal
- Anjana Shakya became a human rights worker in 1993 when she began a commitment of institutionalizing the participation of rural and marginalized women and children, especially girls. She has been attacked by a small group of elite women in Katmandu for the concept of including rural women in such efforts as preparation for the 1995 UN Beijing women's conference and by insisting that all castes, ethnic and economic backgrounds be involved in the Beyond Beijing activities. Her human rights works has included trafficking involving the survivors in documenting their experiences and empowering activism in their communities. She started Himalayan Human Rights Monitors (HIMRIGHTS) which offers workshops, conferences, involves children from diverse backgrounds in "Mock Parliaments" where they work on issues such as the impact of armed conflict on their education, trafficking, child labor, and street children. Five Mock Parliaments are planned for this year in each of the five development regions of Nepal .
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Lily Thapa, Nepal
- Lily Thapa started Women for Human Rights (WHR) to help bring widows out of traditional isolation and dependency in their husbands' homes into networks that connect them with each other and where they receive training, counseling, leadership skills and support. WHR also promotes entrepreneurship and a micro credit program allows economic independence. The number of single women (widows) organized has grown to 14,000 in 36 districts in all five development regions. The groups have attracted the support of men and married women who once were reluctant to participate. Lily Thapa has built partnerships and established South Asian Network for Widows Empowerment in Development (SANWED). She has also worked with media and has brought widows' issues to the government's attention. "All we want to do is to spread self-reliance and hope so that single women can help themselves and their families."
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2005

Sadiqa Basiri, Afghanistan
- After the inspiration of the 1995 UN Conference on Women, Sadiqa returned to Afghanistan and joined with six other women to form the Afghan Women's Network, a coalition based in both Pakistan and Afghanistan joining women's groups of all kinds throughout the country to advocate for every kind of needed improvements in the lives of women, from ending domestic Violence, to writing women's rights into the new constitution. At AWN, Sadiqa served initially as Assistant Director and then she also took on the position of Advocacy Manager on National and International Affairs. She oversaw AWN's projects in its three offices, two in Afghanistan and one in Pakistan . Her travels to Germany and the US gave her opportunity to organize networks of young Afghan Germans and Americans to support AWN and contribute to the constitutional rights of women in Afghanistan .
  
  Understanding that education is the true key to equality, she started two schools in the region she left at age six, Wardak province, one with 104 and the other with 400 girls, and one school in Jalalabad province with 100 girls. She co-founded an NGO called OMID ("Hope") to provide primary school education in provinces of Afghanistan where there have never been schools. With no help from the struggling government Sadiqa had found teachers (10th grade education makes them qualified), persuaded skeptical mothers to let their daughters attend half-days before calling them back for household help in the rural, agricultural world of the villages, found space and purchased books and supplies for classes. All of the schools teach basic reading and arithmetic, for half days. Most of the students (ages 7-13) have seen no schooling whatsoever in their young years, and face arranged marriages all too soon. OMID also provides shelter and education in Kabul for street children who lost their parents during the war.
  
  In that first year, thanks to Sadiqa, over six hundred girls started on the road to literacy and more, a road that every kind of development research shows leads to a better life.
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Lizette dela Caridad Caraballo, Cuba
- As the President of FLAMUR (Latin American Federation of Rural Women), Lizette has been able to motivate and empower women to promote equal participation and decision making at every level in Cuban rural areas. Since she was elected President in 2003, the organization has expanded its membership with delegations in 10 of the 14 Cuban provinces, and has created 14 independent sewing workshops and 4 independent pig raising cooperatives (not controlled by the government). She has also created 12 cosmetology workshops and has prepared 63 conferences and seminars about domestic violence, alcoholism, environmental care and human rights.
  
  In spite of suffering intimidation, arrests and property confiscation by the Cuban government, Lizette has managed to create an ample network of mutual support and empowerment throughout the country. Under her leadership, FLAMUR has also created alternative sources of work and has even established programs to provide material and humanitarian aid to rural women in Cuba .
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Alice Garg, India
- Beginning life as a teacher, Alice left her job in 1972 in order to undertake voluntary social work so that she could be more directly supporting the poor. Initially her voluntary social work focussed on the children from the dalit , or untouchable, families. From 1972 - 1982 she initiated an NGO Bal Rashmi which provided schools for girls and boys in the Jaipur slums and neighbouring villages. She created 'Village Home-cum-Schools' for orphan and destitute children with a team of dedicated workers and teachers. In 1981, she began to work with women, rehabilitating poor families rendered homeless by the flash floods of 1981 in and around Jaipur. As she worked with the women she became more and more drawn to the political challenge to ensure the empowerment of women and to the need to secure their rights.
  
  In addition to her voluntary development work, Alice Garg has also worked for women's rights. She has led campaigns to reserve 33% seats for women in the state legislative assemblies as well as the country's parliament. She has worked to end harmful practices against women, such as child marriage, and dowry practice, helping to bring about the anti-dowry law by the Government of India. She has set up political forums in villages such as the ' Mahila Mandals ' and ' Kishori Mandals ' (Women's Forum and Adolescent Girls' Forums) in order to discuss and help end ' Bal Vivah ' (Child Marriage), ' Nukta' (a large scale feast for thousands on death of a member of the family), 'Bal Bandhwa Majdoor' (children given away by parents for bonded labour). She has been unafraid of persecution that has arisen because of her human rights work for women. In the 1990s she had to go underground due to her public support of a young girl who was gang raped and other victims of rape.
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Bogaletch Gebre, Ethiopia
- While still at UCLA, Bogaletch founded Parents International Ethiopia (PIE)- Development Through Education, a non-for profit organization, in Los Angeles California . Her hope was to establish Children Centers, for children who lost their parents due to famine. These Centers in turn would become a resource center for the community. The second objective was to address "the book famine," a scarcity of books, including learning and teaching materials. Many charity organizations were developed as the result of Ethiopian famine, however, as her organization had not yet established a track record, it was difficult to secure financial support. She did not give up; she had to find other means of raising funds.
  The young woman who, after a spinal injury in an auto crash in 1978 was told that she would never be able to resume normal activities, started running marathons to raise the needed funds. For her first run in the Great Western Hemisphere Marathon (she was the first African woman who ever participated), she sent letters to her friends and schoolmates asking for sponsorships. Her T-shirt read, "If my people walk 400 miles barefoot and hungry, I can run 26 miles to help them. Would you help Ethiopian children?" In her first marathon, she raised 2,650USD, and sent $26,000 in technical books; books in health, medical, physical and biological sciences, mathematics, engineering, law, and literature, to schools in Ethiopia. Through this project, her organization shipped over 350,000 books to universities and high schools in Ethiopia and some 25,000 to black colleges in the southern United States .
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Joy Constance Kwesiga, Uganda
- When Joy attended secondary school as a young women, she was the only girl in her whole district to go to secondary school in her year. She then literally worked her way from a humble clerical position to the deanship of Social Sciences at Makerere University - having received the votes of 85% of her mostly male colleagues.
  
  She is a pioneer in civil society, who, with a small group of women, created a now leading non-governmental organization called Action for Development that promotes women's empowerment in all fields. ACFODE was formed when peace came to Uganda after the horrors of the Amin and Obote years (1971 through 1985), so that women might become fully participating citizens in the governance of their re-born country. As a multi-issue women's rights organization, ACFODE tackles gender inequalities in legal, economic, political and educational sectors. It has a strong rural outreach program, conducts frequent research projects, carries out advocacy work and produces varied publications. Through ACFODE and another NGO, the Uganda Association of University Women, Joy and her colleagues instigated the creation of an affirmative action program at Makerere University that raised the proportion of women among students there to 40%. They then pushed for establishing a Department of Women and Gender Studies that would institutionalize women's concerns. As head of DWGS she took the unusual initiative of reaching out to the community by offering evening courses for adults, and organizing innumerable public lectures, at the City Hall and elsewhere, on development issues.
  
  Joy Kwesiga is moving on. She is the leading force behind the creation of an exciting new university in the southwest, where Uganda 's borders meet those of Rwanda , Congo and Tanzania ; it is just over 100 miles from Bushenyi, where Perdita interviewed families. Joy accepted her colleagues' request that she serve as the first Vice Chancellor (President) of the newly established University of Kabale and she will soon leave her responsibilities at Makerere University to take up the position full time.
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Yung Panit, Cambodia
- Soon after he joined CDP (Cambodian Defenders Project, established in 1994 as the largest provider of free legal service in the country) Yung was elected to become the Legal Trainer for the newly formed Women's Resource Center (WRC), the first program in Cambodia dedicated to a multi-agency approach to provide legal and social services to battered women. CDP created the Women's Resource Center (WRC) in 1997 specifically to meet the needs of victims of domestic violence. Initially, the WRC conducted general training and "train the trainer" workshops for women's NGOs focusing on legal strategy, safety and protection issues, and the need to empower battered women by involving them in the legal decision-making process. Training has been offered on the laws relating to domestic violence - marriage, family and criminal laws - to NGOs, government officials, police, lawyers and students. The WRC is committed to community education through the development, publication and distribution of information to raise awareness and promote women's legal rights and access to the court system. Through WRC, Mr. Yung began an extensive country-wide outreach program on the need to respect women within the family. He has presented arguments against the culturally accepted practice of domestic violence and provided basic advice to battered women using traditional methods of mediation, which typically put the blame for the abuse on the women. Yung faced harassment and threat for his role in counseling women, but he continues his work and encourages CDP to expand its work on the most pressing issues facing women in Cambodia.
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Salima Tlemçani, Algeria
- Salima Tlemçani is a senior reporter for El Watan , an independent newspaper in Algeria . Ms. Tlemçani has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate outstanding bravery and an unfailing commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights despite the dangerous or difficult circumstances she faces daily in her country. Ms. Tlemçani's work reflects a commitment to reporting the truth about injustice, corruption, and human rights violations in the face of great challenges, including death threats.
  
  Ms. Tlemçani joined El Watan in 1992 and has covered armed Islamist groups in Algeria for more than 12 years. During Algeria's eight-year-long civil war, she reported accounts of alleged rapes and murders of women by Islamist groups across Algeria and followed the 2001 court cases of the only 3 women who filed complaints and called for justice on their behalf. As a result, she was put on a death list by the Armed Islamic Group, which has assassinated 10 of the 22 journalists named to the list. For that reason, she writes under the pen name Salima Tlemçani. Ms. Tlemçani is currently battling several lawsuits and a prison sentence as a result of her fearless reporting.
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Berhane Ras-work, Switzerland
- Over twenty years ago Berhane chose as her "mission in life" the elimination of female genital mutilation. She organized, and is president of a non-governmental organization, the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices, with 28 affiliates in African countries and seven in Europe , Japan and New Zealand . The IAC, as it is known in much of the development community, especially the United Nations, is committed to breaking the taboos which are destructive of women and girls, most specifically that of female genital mutilation, and at the same time the IAC is committed to supporting constructive traditional practices that affect women and children.
  
  Her accomplishments include the following: Legislation in 14 African countries against FGM and other harmful traditional practices; the adoption of the Draft Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights of Women; more and more youth refusing to undergo FGM in countries such as Tanzania, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, and Niger; reconversion of excisers as productive forces and agents for positive behavioral change; recognition by the General Assembly of the problem of FGM, and the Commission on the Status of women of FGM as a form of violence; special official statue attributed to the IAC by African Union, WHO and the UN; and in 1995 the UN Population Award was given to IAC.
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Nani Zulminarni, Indonesia
- As a student activist in the early 80s, Nani protested with other young Muslim women for the right to wear head scarves (at the time under Soeharto, these were not allowed). For them, it was a critical struggle to defend their rights, even though the covers led to discrimination in public schools and offices. Her desire to challenge women's subordinate status led Nani to become a field worker for PPSW, organizing poor rural women. At the time, the repressive political context in Indonesia left little space to question or challenge traditional roles and attitudes. However, with the Soeharto regime's emphasis on economic development in Indonesia , income-generating projects were encouraged, even with women. Through her work with PPSW, Nani used small micro-finance projects as a starting point to open conversations with women on other critical issues. Literacy became a major demand as Nani saw many women tricked by their husbands into signing documents that they did not understand-documents that were often agreements to allow the husband to take another wife. It also became clear that many of the women were suffering from the national family planning programs through which forced use of IUDs and other contraception were leaving rural women with major infections and other medical problems. Through her work, Nani began to talk with the women about their beliefs regarding sexuality, gradually addressing questions about negotiating condom use with their partners.
  
  Over the last seventeen years, Nani has assumed many leadership roles in PPSW. She became the Director in 1995, stepping down in 2000 to become the Board Chair. As a leader, she has shown great commitment to applying the principles behind PPSW's work to the organization itself, stressing democratic decision making, providing opportunities for staff development, and stepping down a year earlier than intended so as to create space for new leadership. In 2001, Nani was asked by Komas Perempuan, a leading women's rights organizations in Indonesia , to research the situation of women widows in Indonesian conflict zones.
  
  Nani is now the national coordinator for PEKKA (Women Headed Household Empowerment Program), a program she founded and built in the last 3 years. PEKKA has already reached more than 6000 women (most surviving on less than a dollar a day) in more than 200 villages in 8 provinces: Aceh, West Java , Central Java , West Kalimantan , West Nusa Tenggara, East Nusa Tenggara, Southeast Sulawesi and North Maluku.
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2003

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