Harvard University
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Join Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership as we celebrate 2015 Gleitsman International Activist Award winners Fartuun Adan and Ilwad Elman for their fierce and relentless leadership of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center (EPHRC) and Sister Somalia – organizations focused on tackling gender-based violence and the rehabilitation of child soldiers in their home country of Somalia.
For more information, please visit: cpl.hks.harvard.edu More about EPHRC and Sister Somalia Founded in 1980 by Fartuun and her husband, Elman Ali Ahmed, the EPHRC was the first crisis center of its kind in Somalia.
For almost two decades, from 1980-1996, Fartuun and her husband partnered in peacemaking efforts, providing medical care and educational and vocational opportunities to orphans and child soldiers serving warlords. They advocated education as an alternative to violence and they coined the still-popular Somali peace mantra: “Put down the gun and pick up the pen.” Elman Ahmed was assassinated in 1996 and Fartuun fled Somalia with her three daughters.
In 2007, leaving her children and the safety of her new home in Canada behind, Fartuun returned to Mogadishu at the height of violence there to continue the work of rehabilitating child soldiers. In 2010 Ilwad Elman joined her mother in Somalia and became her full partner in directing and expanding the work of EPHRC. With bare-bones funding Fartuun and Ilwad co-founded Sister Somalia, the country’s first rape crisis center, in 2011.
Headquartered in Mogadishu, Sister Somalia now operates crisis centers and safe houses across Somalia, and has served over 6,000 women and girls with educational, psychosocial, vocational, emergency relocation, and medical referral services to-date. Ilwad and Fartuun have tirelessly promoted human rights, peaceful co-existence, and created programs for gender based violence (GBV) survivors while continuing their work to rehabilitate child soldiers.
Under their shared leadership of EPHRC, Fartuun and Ilwad influence policy change, empower other Somali civil society organizations to act, and develop partnerships with national and international state actors including Mogadishu’s Child Protection Working Group with UNICEF. Fartuun and Ilwad’s work has garnered recognition from the Peace and Human Rights network, the Obama administration (2013 “Women in Courage” award) and speaking invitations and consulting requests by the United Nations and foreign governments.
Past honorees of this prestigious award include Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Yunus Social Business Foundation
Location:NYE ABC, Taubman Building, 5th Floor
Date:Thursday, November 19, 2015
Time:6:00 PM