About Karama

'Karama’ is the Arabic word for dignity, as well as an initiative fueled by a coalition of partners as constituencies to build a movement to end violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa. Karama puts emphasis on women from the ground up, addressing violence as they define it, with solutions of their own design.

Launched in 2005 to provide a framework for coordination, cooperation, and linkage among people working to stop violence against women, Karama has initiated an unprecedented range of multi-sectoral collaboration and advocacy by women across the region at the national, regional, and international levels.

Karama’s partners include organizations in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Palestine with experience in political advocacy, research, service provision, community outreach, and working with targeted groups.

Utilizing all of the available information on the causes and consequences of violence, Karama’s individual participants and organizational partners have worked to expand the concept of violence against women and push aside old boundaries separating them from each other. They use their own analysis, they propose the strategies and solutions, and together the different organizations build national action plans and aim to grow a regional movement to end violence against women.

Mission 

Karama aims to build upon and strengthen efforts to end violence against women by bringing together local women's organizations and other civil society groups in collaboration, analysis, and advocacy at national, regional, and international levels. Karama’s mission is not only to widen the national constituencies working to end violence against women in the Middle East and North Africa, but also to widen the roles and contributions of Arab women in key civil society sectors. Finally, Karama seeks to raise the profile and expand the influence of Arab women as leaders in regional and international contexts.

Strategy 

With headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, and an office in Amman, Jordan, Karama began in July 2005 to reach across the region to build a cascading national and regional movement to end violence against women. The partners in Karama are diverse, specialized, and hold practical experience across many fields. Karama convenes activists and experts across seven realms to form national networks that address violence as both a cause and a consequence of the challenges facing each country's politics, economics, health, art/culture, education, media and laws. The solutions to end violence come from across these seven realms—and fortify them all in return.

What makes Karama different? 

Karama’s approach to ending violence against women is one of the things that distinguishes it from other initiatives. Rather than looking at violence and its victims in isolation, Karama takes a broader view in the belief that violence affects women and men, girls and boys, at all levels of society and in all areas of their lives. To bring an end to violence against women, it is therefore necessary to identify the ways it affects and is affected by economics, politics, law, health, media, education, and art/culture—the things that matter most in people’s daily lives—and to design strategies to combat it through each of these spheres.

International Recognition

• Donors from the United States, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden have sought Karama as a regional advisor and conduit to local women's organizations in the Arab region, North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia.

• In 2009, Hibaaq Osman, Karama's Founder and CEO, was selected for a special NGO membership by the Clinton Global Initiative.  Karama’s Commitment to Action to build constituencies for equality in the Middle East and North Africa was subsequently honored at the Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative held in September 2009 in New York City.