Leila is a transnational feminist leader, strategist, and advisor with over 25 years of organizing, advocacy and philanthropic experience advancing feminist funding, human rights, gender equality, and sexual and reproductive rights and justice.  Born in Algeria and educated in the U.S., France, and Morocco; Leila has lived and worked in forty countries across Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia. In 2022, she founded Leila Hessini Strategies, a consulting firm that works strategically with key feminist funds, movements and organizations across Africa and the Middle East to advance social justice and rights-based resourcing and movement strategies. She serves as a Senior Strategist for the Urgent Action Fund-Africa and Trust Africa’s Harambee-Ubuntu Feminist and Pan-African Philanthropies initiative and for the Urgent Action Funds’ Feminist Republik, an African Women’s Human Rights Defenders Platform that merges healing justice, holistic and collective safety, security and care and knowledge generation.  She is joint founder of the Feminists Dream Space, a global south-led initiative which seeks to create a new and different philanthropic ecosystem grounded in feminist narratives, funding, architecture and politics. Leila also serves as a Senior International Fellow at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon where she is researching women’s philanthropic actions across North Africa and the Middle East. From 2017-2023, Leila held the position as Vice-President of Programs at Global Fund for Women where she oversaw its strategic grantmaking, movement-strengthening, global advocacy and philanthropic collaborations. At GFW, she doubled its grantmaking to over $17 million, launched its feminist and gender-based movements and crises work, created an adolescent girls program led by a girls’ advisory council and led its philanthropic advocacy work. 

Prior to that she served on the senior leadership team of Ipas from 2002 to 2016 where she published extensively on abortion rights and justice, lead global advocacy efforts and partnered with feminist groups working on self-management, community strategies and stigma reduction around bodily integrity and sexual and reproductive rights. Leila’s recent publications include The Impact of MacKenzie Scott’s giving on Women’s Funds and the importance of Pan-African and feminist philanthropic approaches.  She has also recently written an article in Devex on Disaster Philanthropy Needs a Feminist and Participatory Approach, a chapter in the Oxford Gender and Development special issues on Beijing+25 on Financing for Gender Equality and Women’s Rights, an article in Gender and Security  on the importance of a feminist lens to social change philanthropy, and an overview of lessons around the world as the U.S. dismantles Roe v Wade in Ms. Magazine.  She has written extensively on the political nature of veiling across North Africa and the Middle East, abortion practices in majority Muslim contexts and feminist approaches to sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice. Leila holds an MPH in public health and a MA in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, studied Islamic law in Morocco and pursued doctoral studies in sociology in France.