Marwa Baabbad, Researcher and Development Consultant, Associate Fellow, RUSI - Marwa has over nine years of experience working in the fields of community engagement, gender, peace and security, and youth political inclusion. Marwa recently worked as the Director of the Oxford Research Group Strategic Peacebuilding Programme. As part of her work at ORG, she led the delivery of a Track-II project that fed into the UN-led Yemen peace process. She has previously worked as a development professional with Saferworld in Yemen. During that time, she led on WPS and youth projects in Yemen and contributed to the organisation’s work on Egypt, Libya and Syria neighbouring countries. Marwa was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics Center for Women, Peace and Security. She was also a member of the Youth Consultative Group for the UNDP’s 2016 Arab Human Development Report. Marwa holds a master’s degree in Post-war Recovery Studies from the University of York which she completed with a Chevening Scholarship award.

Ewa K. Strzelecka - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She currently leads the EU-funded research project: “Rethinking Peace-building: women, revolution, exile, and conflict resolution in Yemen” (https://www.peacewomenproject.com). Previously, she worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Granada in Spain. She holds Ph.D. in Social Science and has over 15 years of research, development and consulting experience on Yemen. Her main research interests focus on women's rights movements, peace-building, transnational politics, and the complexity of social and political change in the Middle East. She is the author of Women in the Arab Spring: the Construction of a Political Culture of Feminist Resistance in Yemen (Mujeres en la Primavera Árabe: construcción de una cultura política de resistencia feminista en Yemen, CSIC, 2017).

Mette Hoffman Meyer is Executive Producer at The Why. Mette was previously head of documentaries and co-productions at Denmark’s public service broadcasting cooperation, DR, and Editor of the factual series Documania on DR channel 2. Hoffman Meyer, helped finance films like the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, The Queen of Versailles, and the U.S.-Danish co-productions: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer and the Sundance award winning film: The Red Chapel. She also spearheaded the projects Why Poverty? a series of eight films aired by 70 broadcasters, reaching more than 500 million people world wide. She will be joining via Zoom.

Awfa al-Naami, Yemen Country Manager, Saferworld - Awfa has expertise on peacebuilding, community programming and women’s inclusion in peacebuilding. She previously worked as a Gender Project Manager for Saferworld in Yemen and as a Gender Advisor for the National Foundation for Development and Humanitarian Response, where she coordinated Food, Security and Livelihoods programming. Awfa has worked on gender-related projects with the Japan International Cooperation Agency and holds an MBA.