Esther Dingemans (DRC)
Director, The Dr Denis Mukwege FoundationSince 2000, Esther has dedicated her career to implementing quality sexual violence prevention and response programs in conflict. Working for UN agencies and NGOs, she has lived and worked in Guinea, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Darfur, Colombia and Syria, managing major humanitarian programmes in the field of gender-based violence and gender mainstreaming. She led capacity-building projects in many more conflict-affected countries, such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
During the last few years she has worked for UNHCR in Geneva, building capacity in humanitarian workers to better understand and implement strategies to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, developing offline and online organisation-wide training tools. Esther gets her inspiration from innovative community-based initiatives against gender-based violence that she encountered in her work. She is involved in supporting several of these grassroots initiatives through board representation or in an advisory role.