Lina Abou-Habib

Lina Abou-Habib (@LinaAH) is Director of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut.

The @AsfariInstitute is the first research center bridging academia and activism. Focusing on analyzing, documenting and training social movements and NGO activists, the institute aims at consolidating Civil Society initiatives locally and regionally in the Arab world.

Lina teaches and writes about feminist movements, gender and citizenship in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, gender and economic rights, and care work. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Gender and Development, and a strategic advisor for the Global Fund for Women, an NGO that funds grassroots women-led movements.  She is an advisor to  the newly established Doria Feminist Fund @DoriaFund, the first feminist fund for the MENA region.

Lina has published extensively on the impact of the denial of citizenship rights to women in the Middle East and North Africa. She has considerable experience working with international and regional organizations and foundations, public institutions, universities, community organizations, and media outlets in the MENA region, with particular focus on furthering the understanding of gender and feminist theory and mainstreaming gender in development programs and policies.

She is also a Gender and Women’s Economic Empowerment Fellow at the Center for Inclusive Business and Leadership for Women at the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business and the Gender Director for the AUB Tomorrow’s Leaders Gender Scholars Program (MEPI–TLS) at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Among her previous positions are Senior Policy Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, Executive Director of the Women Learning Partnership in Washington D.C. and leadership at the Collective for Research and Training for Development – Action.

She holds an M.A. in public health from the American University in Beirut and was a PhD candidate in gender and public policy at AUT in New Zealand.