Zama Neff is the executive director of the children's rights division of Human Rights Watch, where she leads the organization’s work on children’s rights. Neff’s expertise covers a range of issues affecting children, including access to education, police violence, refugee protection, the worst forms of child labor, and discrimination against women and girls. Neff is a founder and now chairs the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA), unique inter-agency collaboration of non-governmental organizations and UN agencies dedicated to protecting schools, teachers, and students from targeted attack during armed conflict.
Neff’s work has covered countries such as Afghanistan, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Somalia, and the United States. She has written 12 reports on children’s rights issues for Human Rights Watch and is interviewed frequently in the media.
During a sabbatical in 2006/2007, Neff ran a protection monitoring team for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Sri Lanka. Before joining Human Rights Watch in 1999, Neff clerked for a US federal judge, advocated on behalf of immigrants and refugees in the US, and worked with community development and women's organizations in Honduras. She is a graduate of Davidson College and New York University School of Law where she was a Root-Tilden-Snow Public Interest Scholar.
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