Ravi Karkara
Ravi Karkara is a trained Social Worker with commitment to advancing human rights, gender equality, inclusion and social justice. Ravi has served as the Global Advisor on Youth + Partnership with United Nations Millennium Campaign and UN-HABITAT, based in New York. He is the lead author of the groundbreaking report “Youth 21: Building the Architecture of Youth Engagement in the UN System,” by UN-Habitat, which contributed to the creation of United Nations Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth. Ravi represented UN-HABITAT as the Co-chair of the UN Interagency Network on Youth Development. Government of Sri Lanka appointed him as the Global Advisor to the World Conference on Youth in 2014, focusing on youth perspective in developing post-2015 development agenda. He has relentlessly supported United Nations SG’s My World 2015 survey in reaching close to 2 million youth. Ravi has been co-chairing the Policy Strategy Group for World We Want 2015 - a UN & CSO post-2015 data-curation-visualization platform. He is serving as Strategic Adviser Partnership Beijing+20, Office of the Assistant Secretary-General/Deputy Executive Director, UN Women. His has committed his lifetime to women’s empowerment, strengthening human rights of girls, young women and women, gender equality and social inclusion. He is a founding member of the MenEngage Alliance and Young Men 4 Gender Equality. He has worked with several organizations on gender equality with a specific focus on children, youth and women including UN-Women, UNICEF, UNMC, Save the Children – has been successfully advocating role of boys and men in gender equality from a life-cycle approach. He has extensive experience in facilitating and managing strategy processes with diverse range of audience ranging from policy makers to development workers to local communities.
