Hanafi, Leila

Leila Hanafi is a visiting research fellow at UNU-CRIS, within the Migration and Social Policy Cluster and within the Nature, Climate and Health Cluster.  She is a Moroccan-American international development lawyer with the World Bank Group, and adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School’s International and Comparative Law Program, with more than 18 years of academic and operational experience with international organizations (World Bank Group, United Nations), Governments, universities and international NGOs in: regional integration, legal analysis and human rights lawyering, rule of law and accountability, access to justice, gender in fragile and forcibly displaced context, sexual and reproductive rights, and  policy orientated and legal research and drafting. Leila holds a doctorate in law from the University of Kent Law School and completed her undergraduate and graduate legal studies at George Washington University and Georgetown University and American University. 

She is currently leading the legal reform workstream at the World Bank Group’s Global Financing Facility Secretariat and provides technical and strategic expertise to identify country-led gender reform opportunities across Sub-Saharan Africa, coordinate broad stakeholder consultations and lead high-level policy dialogue to support their adoption and implementation. Her research focuses on laws, regulations and policies aiming at empowering women and adolescent girls, including improving access to inclusive education, quality maternal child health services, family planning, and preventing gender-based violence, including harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage.

At UNU-CRIS, Leila will primarily work on regional legal frameworks and instruments within Africa aimed at promoting women’s right to health in fragile states. The research situates women’s reproductive health in crisis within international and regional legal standards, with a focus on the Sub-Saharan Africa region where fragility and conflict and violence (FCV) and forced displacement is rapidly evolving.  The research identifies the legal the barriers and facilitating factors, in the normative and implementation legal frameworks, when accessing sexual and reproductive health services for forcibly displaced women.