Fartuun Adan

Ms. Fartuun Adan is the Executive Director of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre, a Somali NGO based in Mogadishu, Somalia. Ms. Adan has championed human and women’s rights, peace-building, development, and the rehabilitation of child soldiers across Somalia, often under insecure and dangerous conditions. Ms. Adan and her husband worked for years as ardent peace activists. Advocating for education as an alternative to perpetual violence and as a means to lift Somalia out of its 20 year cycle of civil conflict, they jointly coined the popular Somali peace mantra: “Put down the gun and pick up the pen.” In 1996, Somali warlords assassinated her husband for his and Fartuun Adan’s peacemaking efforts. When her husband’s family took over the organization and left her with no financial means, Ms. Adan fled to Canada as a refugee where she raised her three daughters. She returned to Somalia in 2007 at the height of conflict in Mogadishu, between the Union of Islamic Courts, Warlords, and Ethiopian forces, to continue the work that she and her late husband had begun. In 2010, Ms. Adan initiated a Sister Somalia program to support SGBV victims who had survived rapes and/or escaped forced marriages. She established Somalia’s first sexual violence hotline and rape crisis center in Mogadishu in 2011. To date, the center has served over 400 Somali women and girls, offering counseling and medical services, business start-up kits and funds, entrepreneurial skills training, and relocation to safe haven. Ms. Adan has also restarted the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre’s efforts to reintegrate former child soldiers back into society by providing disengaged teenage child soldiers with both education and job training skills. These skills have allowed them to fill jobs created by the exodus of skilled laborers who fled Mogadishu’s violence. Many of these former child soldiers now work as teachers, electricians, and mechanics, as well as other professions. On average, she has trained 350 youths per year, and plans to expand this number to 700 for 2013 and to areas recently recaptured from al-Shabaab by African Union and Somali forces.