Rekaya Hafi

Ms. Rekaya El-Hafi is a Tunisian humanitarian, political activist and business manager. She was a member of the Act For Tunisia Political Party (Halomou Li Tounes) and is in charge of the relations with civil society and political parties. She was one of the candidates running for the parliament elections in October 2019 and a potential candidate for the office of President of Tunisia. Rekaya was born in Jemna-Kebili in southern Tunisia in 1973. During her early childhood, men in this part of Tunisia believed that women did not need to be educated. Rekaya fought hard to get educated and obtained her International Marketing degree in 1999. Rekaya worked between 2003 and 2006 as a commercial manager for a foreign textile company. After 2006, she became a partner in Ocean, a mattress fabrication company. And in 2018, she started her own business, Reka Business World. Rekaya is well known for her humanitarian work in saving Yazidi women from ISIS on the Turkish-Syrian border in 2013. However, her activities started much earlier. In 1992, Rekaya spontaneously enrolled the children of an entire village in schools in southern Tunisia after they were deprived of education because they were not registered in the civil status as citizens and their parents were married according to tribal custom. Rekaya was able to register all married couples in the civil register, which made their children eligible for healthcare and education. Today these children have become educated, intellectuals, doctors, engineers and statesmen thanks to the spontaneous favor of a 19-year-old girl. Rekaya defended human rights in Tunisia, Africa and worldwide, especially minorities’ rights and was even asked to become the religious minority delegate for Tunisia in September 2013. She became an active member in the Tunisia Grow Organization, a Tunisian NGO working on children’s mental and social development in public schools in 2016. After she left the NGO in 2017, she started her own organization “Aya lilIinsaniya” (In translation: Miracle For Humanity) in 2018. Rekaya became a member of L'Observatoire International Pour la Non-Violence-Communes des Nations Pour la Paix (Associated with the United Nations). She was concerned about Muslim-Christian relations in the Tunisian society and ultimately succeeded in changing the Constitution that stated that a Tunisian woman can’t marry a non-Muslim. Rekaya succeeded in achieving her goal of equality between Muslims and Christians in civil unions. This effort resulted in changing the constitution on August 13, 2017.