Lina AbiRafeh is CEO of Every Woman. She is a women’s rights and global crisis leadership strategist with three decades of experience in humanitarian emergencies across more than 20 countries worldwide, including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Papua New Guinea.
She is Founder and CEO of Better4Women, her feminist advisory practice, and Chaos Leadership, her signature framework for leading through crisis. Through both, she advises global institutions on women’s rights, leadership, and organisational change.
She brings extensive frontline experience on violence against women and girls, including deployments to high-level emergencies such as Haiti, the Central African Republic, Nepal, and others. In these settings, she designed national prevention and response strategies and led coordination across governments, donors, and UN agencies.
Lina has held senior leadership roles with the United Nations, international NGOs, and academia, including a decade in executive leadership at the Arab Institute for Women at the Lebanese American University. Across policy, academic, and philanthropic settings, she has directed multi-agency operations and designed strategies that institutionalised protections for women and girls. She serves on international boards addressing gender equality and global policy.
Lina is the author of four books: Feminist Firestarter: Activism for an Unraveling World, Yalla Feminists: Arab Rights & Resistance, Freedom on the Frontlines: Afghan Women and the Fallacy of Liberation, and Gender, and International Aid in Afghanistan: The Politics and Effects of Intervention, along with two ebooks and more than 100 published articles.
She is a two-time TEDx speaker and has spoken at the Oxford Union, Women Deliver, and other global stages. She is a media commentator on outlets including CNN, Al Jazeera, and France 24. Lina holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and an MA from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Her work has been recognised through fellowships with Vital Voices and the Council on Foreign Relations, and repeated inclusion in the Gender Equality Top 100: The Most Influential People in Global Policy.
Lina believes in building a better world for women.