Gayatri Patel

Gayatri Patel (she/her) is an executive strategist and leading global advocate with over two decades of experience shaping international human rights and gender equality policy. Throughout her career, she has driven systemic change and built powerful, high-impact movements across the nonprofit, government and multilateral sectors.

Gayatri has served in pivotal leadership roles, most recently as the Chief External Affairs Officer at Malala Fund and Vice President of Advocacy and External Relations at the Women’s Refugee Commission. A master coalition-builder, her strategic leadership at CARE was instrumental in spearheading some of the most influential advocacy coalitions in the field, including the Coalition for a Feminist Foreign Policy in the U.S., the Coalition for Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality and the Coalition to End Violence Against Women and Girls Globally.

Her deep global policy expertise includes a decade at the U.S. Department of State advising on refugee and migration policy, human trafficking, and multilateral diplomacy, as well as serving on the ground in Cairo during the Arab Spring as Director of Legal Programming for AMERA. In recognition of her global impact, Gayatri was named to Apolitical’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy and received the prestigious Perdita Huston Human Rights Award from the United Nations Association. Currently based in Washington, D.C., she operates as an strategic advocacy consultant, serves as a Senior Fellow with the Population Institute’s Repros Fight Back Initiative and as a Senior Advisor for the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, and shapes the next generation of global leaders as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs.