Assalah Shikhani is a Program Coordinator and Projects Manager with over a decade of experience advancing women’s leadership, civil society empowerment, and inclusive policy reform across the MENA region. Her work bridges grassroots advocacy and formal policy spaces, engaging government institutions and ministries to drive regulatory reform and evidence-based decision-making. She has also led protection programming for vulnerable populations and community outreach initiatives centered on refugee and displaced communities, with particular attention to women’s inclusion in institutional decision-making. A certified Project Management for Development (PMD Pro) professional fluent in Arabic and English, she brings a grounded, practitioner’s perspective to discussions on women’s empowerment and social impact.

Accumulated Crises, Enduring Advocacy: Women's Empowerment Across War, Displacement, Disaster, and Political Transition This presentation draws on over a decade of frontline experience advancing women's empowerment amid a succession of overlapping crises —armed conflict, forced displacement, natural disaster, a global pandemic, and, most recently, political transition in Syria. Speaking from the dual perspective of a Syrian refugee based in Turkey since 2012 and a practitioner leading women's empowerment programming throughout this period, the presentation examines how each crisis reshaped the terrain for advocacy while revealing common threads that connect them. Rather than treating war, the 2023 earthquake, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Syria's evolving political landscape as isolated emergencies, this presentation argues that their accumulation has produced a distinct set of challenges and adaptive strategies for women's leadership work — from sustaining protection programming under acute instability, to rebuilding community trust after disaster, to navigating shifting institutional access during political change. Each context demanded different tools, yet all converged on a single imperative: strengthening social cohesion as the foundation for durable women's leadership and inclusion. Drawing on direct engagement with government institutions, civil society actors, and displaced and refugee communities, this presentation offers a practitioner's synthesis of how crisis-tested advocacy can evolve into a coherent, transferable model — one that centers women's agency not as a single-context intervention, but as a continuous thread of leadership building across compounding instability. It closes with reflections on what this accumulated experience offers to practitioners and policymakers working in other protracted or multi-crisis settings.