Ritu Sharma

Ritu is a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, leading a joint program with the International Youth Foundation on Youth, Prosperity and Security. She is also the senior gender advisor to IYF.

Prior to this, Ritu was the co-founder and president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a leading advocacy organization bringing the voices of women and girls around the globe to Washington’s highest-level decision makers. Ritu’s advocacy was instrumental in the creation of the White House Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, announced by President Obama in August 2012. Also under her direction, Women Thrive was the driving force behind the US Agency International Development’s establishment of the Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy, also in 2012.

She is author of Teach a Woman to Fish: Overcoming Poverty Around the Globe, which is a first hand account of how women in developing countries are leaving poverty behind them and how American women can be most helpful.

Ritu hosts an occasional radio special on Sirius XM’s Insight Channel on the reality of women’s lives around the world.