Amina Rasul-Bernardo
Kuniharu Nakamura
Amina Rasul-Bernardo is the President of the Philippine Center for Islam and Democracy and host of “She Talks Peace”, a podcast available on Spotify and Apple podcasts. She is a member of the Board of Regents of Mindanao State University. Chosen as one of three Philippine representatives to the ASEAN Women for Peace Registry in 2018, she was a UN PEACE awardee for 2019. In 2007, she received the Muslim Democrat of the Year Award from the Washington, DC–based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). For over 20 years, she has worked on capacity-building of Muslim women for peace-building, human rights, good governance and clean elections. She has developed an Islamic peace education program in cooperation with Muslim religious leaders. She has written and edited several articles and books on the Mindanao conflict, Islam, and democracy. She was a member of the Philippine cabinet under former President Fidel V. Ramos, as Presidential Advisor on Youth Affairs and appointed concurrently as the first chair of the National Youth Commission (NYC), which she organized. She has served as Commissioner of the National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women, representing Muslims. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of the Philippines, an MBA from the Asian Institute of Management, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
