Hadeel Qazzaz was born in Shati refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. She completed her masters in gender and development at Leeds University in the UK in 1993 and finished her Doctorate of Education degree at the same university in 1997. She has more than 20 years’ experience in international development and gender justice. She has worked extensively in the Middle East, as well as in Africa, Central Asia and Canada in areas of gender democracy, democratization processes, integrity and poverty alleviation. Dr. Qazzaz started her career in 1997 working as a research coordinator for the first Palestinian human development report and the Palestine national poverty report. She worked for several international NGOs, such as the German Heinrich Boell Foundation, Integrity Action, Palestinian American Research Centre (PARC), where she was the director of Palestine Office from 2006 to 2011. Currently she serves as a member of the Palestine advisory board of PARC.
Dr. Qazzaz’s academic interests are within the areas of gender and development studies. She taught at the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University and her research focused on feminization of poverty, gender-based violence, and gender inclusion in the social, political and economic decision-making processes. Throughout her career, Dr. Qazzaz has been committed to gender justice and women’s rights, bringing issues of gender responsive budgets and women’s peace and security to the planning and implementation of several community and national development programs. She contributed regularly to the gender statistics yearbook of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. She has a deep knowledge of civil society in the Middle East as well as the challenges and potentials of the region. She has published on “funding Development in Palestine” at the Institute of Palestine Studies.