Rasha Jarhum is a South Yemeni. Jarhum is co-founder and Director of the Peace Track Initiative, hosted at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, at Ottawa University. Through the Peace Track Initiative work, Jarhum has been supporting inclusion of women in the peace process, including by sending women’s independent delegations to UN led and KSA led peace processes, leading Track II diplomacy consultations with women groups, as well as, working to protect women human rights defenders in Yemen. She has led efforts to draft the Yemeni National Agenda for Women, Peace, and Security and led civil society consultations for supporting the development of the National Action Plan for Implementing UNSC 1325 resolution in Yemen.
She is a Gender, Peace, and Security Expert. She has more than 15 years’ experience working to advocate women’s, children’s and refugees’ rights with many organisations including Oxfam, UNICEF, ESCWA, UNDP, and JICA, in Yemen and the Middle East and North Africa region. Jarhum was invited among seven women by the UN Special Envoy to Yemen to support the peace talks held in Kuwait in 2016 and has briefed the UN Security Council on Yemen and Women’s Rights to push for peace.
She is an alumni of the Executive in Residence Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). She is also a 2016 New Voices Aspen fellow at Aspen Institute, USA. Jarhum holds a master’s degree from the University of Nottingham, in International Business Management. Jarhum is also a former affiliated scholar with American University of Beirut.
Jarhum is an award winner of the Women Have Wings Award (2016) and Women Rebels Against War: Anita Augspurg Prize (2019). She is a member of the Women Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL). She is also a founding member of the Women Solidarity Network in Yemen, a founding member for the MENA1325 Network, and a member of the MENA regional Coalition of Women Human Rights Defenders and member of the Women, Peace, and Security Network- Canada.