Meet the YOWLI 2010 Facilitators (II)

YASSINE FALL

Yassine Fall is an economist educated in Senegal, France and the USA with 26 years of experience in development research, policy formulation and program implementation. She has been with the United Nations for 10 years. She is the new Interim Director of INSTRAW now part of UN Women. She first served as UNIFEM Regional Director for Francophone and Lusophone West and Central Africa for two years.  For the past eight years Yassine Fall has served as UNIFEM’s Global Economics Advisor based in New York. During this tenure she was seconded to the UN Millennium Project under the request of Prof Jeffry Sachs who appointed her as Senior Policy Advisor on gender and the MDGs.  She contributed substantively in the Millennium Project including the publication”The End of Poverty”; in setting up the Millennium village in Senegal and in resource mobilization for the Millennium villages. Before returning to UNIFEM she produced two guidebooks on how to meet MDG 3. She recently launched at the 2010 CSW, in partnership with UNDP, the publication entitled “Making the MDG Work    Better for Women”. 

Yassine is among the champions for women’s empowerment in Africa and the African Diaspora. She is the mentor of the African Women Millennium Initiative on Poverty and Human Rights (AWOMI) which organizes every 2 years the Young Women Knowledge and Leadership Institute (YOWLI) bringing together for 1 month youth from all over Africa and its Diaspora to learn how to enhance their participation in development, how to network and build strategic partnerships for fighting poverty. A particular emphasis of her recent work has been to address the gender dimensions of the global food crisis; the social and gender implications of the global financial and economic crisis; the interconnections between economics, gender and HIV/AIDS.  Yassine Fall served a five-year long term leading as Executive Director of the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD), a sister organization to CODESRIA and network of African women in academia and gender equality advocates.Through her leadership and organizational management AAWORD was able to multiply its resource base tenfold and mobilize record numbers of African women to join its membership.

Yassine Fall’s record also includes five years of teaching mathematics and applied economics in US schools and twelve years of work at the head of her own international consulting firm, “African Economists for Social Change”. This successful enterprise entailed work throughout Africa combining field research, capacity development and policy analysis on various development issues, such as: macroeconomics and public sector reform, poverty elimination policies, gender and development, international trade assessment, emergency relief operations, environmental and natural resources management,  land tenure analysis, child labor studies and food security. Fall was the first expert to design World Food Program guidelines on gender equality in emergency operations and food distribution. She contributed substantially to the ILO – West Africa child labor policy using experiences and lessons from long-term engagement with the field. She was a lead expert on the fight against desertification in the Sahel in the 1980s supporting the FAO in promoting environmental health before climate change issues became a global priority.

Yassine played an important role in setting up vital global networks and organizations. She was selected by Mr. Georges Soros in 2000 together with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and President Amadou Toumani Toure of Mali, Her Excellency Zainab Bangoura, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sierra Leone, International Criminal Court Judge Keba Mbaye to name a few,  to constitute the founding  Board of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) generously founded by the Soros Foundation. For four years she worked with President Sirleaf as Chair helping manage and allocate OSIWA’s multi-million-dollar funds as grants to civil society and selected Government entities in West Africa for the promotion of democratic development.  

Yassine Fall is fluent in English, French, Spanish and Wolof. She is the author of several publications including books and articles.

IFEONA FULANI

Ifeona Fulani holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University and an MFA in Creative Writing, also from NYU. Her research interests include Literatures of Africa and the African Diaspora, Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, Globalization and Transnational Feminisms. She recently completed an edited volume of essays titled Archipalegos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music. The essays in the volume take a pan-Caribbean approach to examining the music, performance and cultural impact of influential female artists either based in the Caribbean or in the Caribbean’s diasporas.

Her next book project, provisionally titled Black Women Reconfiguring the Black Atlantic  and developing on her doctoral dissertation, feminizes the discourse of black internationalism and examines the formation of black women’s intellectual communities within the African diaspora. It is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that examines black women’s fiction and film narratives from the US, the Caribbean and the UK, together with literary, film and cultural criticism.

Ifeona Fulani is the author of a number of scholarly articles, a novel, Seasons of Dust and a collection of short stories, Ten Days in Jamaica. She is on the faculty of the Liberal Studies Program at New York University.

ARAME TALL

Arame Tall is a proud native and current resident of Dakar, Senegal, in addition to being a doctorate student in African Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.

 Her dissertation topic, “Reducing vulnerability to climate-related disasters in Africa. A cross-country comparative analysis of disaster management policies across Africa: which way forward in the face of a changing climate?” highlights her passion for climate and environmental issues.  She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Pulitzer Foundation scholarship for academic excellence, which she received while pursuing her graduate degree on climate change and society at Columbia University in New York, USA.

 Prior to that, Arame completed her undergraduate degree at Smith College in Massachusetts, USA. The women and youth empowerment enthusiast has worked with international organizations like the U.N. Institute for Training and Research in Geneva, Switzerland, the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Center in the Hague, Netherlands, and Senegal’s Centre de Suivi Ecologique. She also has a number of publications around climate change issues and is the founder of Afro-Optimism, an Africa-promotion foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. During her leisure hours Arame enjoys reading, cooking, traveling and horse-back riding.

NIOUSHA ROSHANI

Niousha Roshani is the founder of the Nukanti Foundation for Children working with children affected by extreme violence and poverty, as well as an advocate of children's rights. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Child Anthropology at the University of London while continuing her work and research with war-affected children in Colombia. She directed a  recently completed documentary on the lives of children affected by the war in Colombia titled *I Don't Know Why They Call Us Children* screened at various film festivals in the UK and Spain.