Zainab Salbi

Founder, Women for Women International
Movement: Women's Rights

As a young girl living in Baghdad, Iraq, Zainab Salbi, the daughter of Saddam Hussein’s personal pilot, dreamed of helping women around the world escape from fear and tyranny. Many years later she has made this dream a reality. She believes “the status of women is the bellwether for the direction in which society as a whole is headed,” and thus she has worked since her early twenties with women in conflict and post-conflict regions around the world. In providing access to job skills training, microcredit loans, and myriad support services designed to make them more self-sufficient, Zainab enables women in vulnerable areas to become leaders within their communities, thus sparking a grassroots movement allowing women in developing nations to take control of their own lives. In the United States, Zainab has made it possible for American women to connect with women in war torn regions through a sponsorship program. The relationships fostered between these women and their “sisters” overseas helps create an understanding of one another’s culture that would never take place through traditional media efforts. Women in the US are in turn sustaining the movement for women’s rights and global awareness through state chapters, media efforts, and simple word of mouth. She describes her efforts as helping those women who are in need in front of her while masses of women in the United States are coming up behind her to increase her impact. To date, more than 73,000 women in post-war regions have been connected to “sister” sponsors in the United States and other countries around the world.

Zainab founded Women for Women International in 1993. Time magazine has named her an “Innovator of the Month” and Forbes bestowed their 2005 Trailblazer Award upon her. She is frequently interviewed by the BBC, NPR, NBC, PBS, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times. Zainab is the author of Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, published in 2005, and The Other Side of War: Women’s Stories of Survival and Hope, published the following year.

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