Zainab Salbi
Founder, Women for Women International
Executive Producer and Host, Through Her Eyes, Yahoo! News
Author, Freedom is an Inside Job
At the age of 23, Zainab Salbi founded Women for Women International, a grassroots humanitarian and development organization dedicated to serving women survivors of wars.
Under her leadership as CEO (1993-2011), the organization grew from helping 30 women upon its inception to more than 420,000 women in 8 conflict areas and distributed more than $120 million in direct aid and micro credit loans that impacted more than 1.7 million family members.
Zainab is also the EP and Host of several shows including Through Her Eyes on Yahoo News, #MeToo, NOW WHAT? on PBS, and The Nida’a Show on TLC Arabia. She is the author of 4 books including her best-selling memoir Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam and her latest book Freedom is an Inside Job.
She is often identified as one of the leading women changing the world. People Magazine named her as one of the “25 Women Changing The World”, Foreign Policy Magazine named her as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers, Fast Company identified her as one of “100 Most Creative People in Business”, and The Guardian and Newsweek has listed her on their “Top 100 Women of Activists and Campaigners”. And most recently she was identified as one of the 100 most spiritually influential Living People in 2019 by Watkins.