Our team

Deepta is the Principal Investigator for SuPWR. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and is a feminist social scientist with a focus on women’s empowerment and politics of policy processes. Her research interests primarily focus on the empowerment of women and girls, and its core links with their paid work and unpaid care work. She is a dynamic project leader who has developed, fund-raised for, and implemented several research projects on social protection and gendered political economy analysis of women’s economic empowerment programmes and policies. Deepta is an expert on mixed methods research design and qualitative methodologies, and aligns herself closely with issues of power and participation, citizen engagement and governance.

Maheen Sultan is a Co-Principal Investigator and Country Lead for Bangladesh on the SuWPR project. She is a Senior Fellow of Practice at BIGD, BRAC University. She is a development practitioner and researcher with over 25 years’ experience in social development, poverty, civil society and community participation and gender equality. Her research interests centre on social movements, gender justice and political economy. Maheen is also a women’s rights activist and a member of Naripokkho, a Bangladeshi women’s rights organisation. She is the co-editor of ‘Voicing Demands: Feminist Activism in Transitional Contexts’ (Zed Books: London, 2014).

Mona Sherpa is a development and feminist activist. Currently she is working as Assistant Country Director in CARE Nepal and is responsible for providing strategic, management and technical support to all the programme quality team in CARE Nepal. She is a core member of SANGAT (South Asian Feminist Network) and has been part of women’s movement in Nepal and globally. She brings 20+ years of professional experience in diverse capacities across various countries in South Asia as well as countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Switzerland. She has worked with other organisations like ActionAid, HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation, Room to Read, in a role of management and programme leader contributing in the field of women’s rights, governance, climate change, disaster risk reduction, and in the overall management of development interventions ensuring the feminist and human rights angle in all of her work. She has been part of four major multi-country research efforts on the issue of unpaid care work, safe cities for women and local infrastructure for gender transformation. She also possesses expertise in tactfully working with various government agencies and donors. She has worked with people’s organisations being part of social movement mainly on the issue of women’s rights, freed Kamaiya and land rights. She leads SuPWR research initiative in Nepal.

Mubashira Zaidi is the Co-Investigator for India on the SuPWR project, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi . In her research capacity, Mubashira has contributed to policy research and analysis in the area of women’s economic empowerment. She is also a doctorand at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, where she is exploring the existential meaning and value of work for women in the informal sector. Mubashira has a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Shandana is a Co-Investigator for SuPWR, leading on the four Pakistan case studies. She is a Research Fellow and the leader of the Governance Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies (UK). Her research is interdisciplinary and comparative,  and has increasingly focused on the relationship between political participation, inequality and accountability, and her research interests include democratisation, local politics, informal institutions, and the political economy of public policy and service delivery.

Sohela is a Co-Investigator for SuPWR, leading the political economy analysis and four Bangladesh case studies. She is a Fellow at IDS and leads the institutes’ work on gender and politics. She has over 17 years of experience researching feminist movement, gender in policy process, women’s empowerment and violence against women in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Sohela has published widely including in World Development, Contemporary South Asia. Her recent book is Negotiating Gender Equity in the Global South: The Politics of Domestic Violence Policy (Routledge, 2019). She co-convenes IDS’ MA programme on Gender and Development.

Anjam Singh is a research consultant with CARE Nepal working on the SuPWR project. Her research interests include issues of gender and development. Anjam has previously worked on research projects related to women’s economic empowerment, unpaid care work, domestic violence, natural resource governance, feminist leadership, to name a few.

Anweshaa Ghosh is an Indian feminist and qualitative researcher working in the field of women and work for over a decade. Her areas of interest include women’s unpaid and care work, platform economy, domestic work and the contemporary labour and women’s movement in India. Presently, she is a Research Fellow with ISST and has been part of and led various researches across India and in the South Asian region. She has also played a definite role in designing and operating the online course on gender transformative evaluations run by ISST. She is now part of the four member India SuPWR team.

Arunima has been working at CARE Nepal since November 2022 as a Communications Officer. She began her journey with SuPWR as a focal person for Communications for the research project in Nepal. Arunima is responsible for looking after the communications and media/Audio Visual outputs for SuPWR. Being a part of SuPWR has given me a deeper insight into the women’s social movements in Nepal and neighbouring countries, and how the struggles of women across the region are similar even in different country contexts.

Ayesha is the Communications and Outreach Lead at the Institute of Development & Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), a hub for multidisciplinary, evidence-based research that seeks to advance economic, political and social development. Ayesha supports the SuPWR project by coordinating communications on behalf of the Pakistan group. Her work involves developing communications outputs around the SuPWR case studies from Pakistan, and coordinating with the wider communications effort at the country level.

Debbie is the Project Manager for SuPWR, responsible for the financial and contractual administration, risk management, event and travel management, and project reporting. She also provides support to the data management and communications activities. Based at the Institute of Development Studies (UK), she has over eight years’ experience supporting a variety of projects focusing on conflict, governance, gender-based violence, and improving access to education in conflict settings.

Iffat Jahan Antara is a social researcher, gender trainer and translator-interpreter. She has worked with BIGD since 2020 as a Research Associate in the Gender and Social Transformation Cluster. She is working on the Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights (SuPWR) and investing the Trade Union Movement for Decent Wage and the female leadership within the movement. Gender and Sexuality, Gender based Violence, Economic Empowerment and Transnational Feminist Movement are her particular research interests. She has working experience in Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights and GBV.

Leah is a Communications Officer for SuPWR, based at the Institute of Development Studies. She is an international development professional with over 18 years' experience in knowledge management and research communication.

Pragyna Mahpara is a Research Associate at the Gender and Social Transformation cluster of BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, Bangladesh. Her research experience includes analysing domestic violence survivors’ access to justice; unpacking the role of informal networks in negotiating policy and legal measures of Bangladesh; understanding adolescent's voice and agency through the use of ICT; analysing garment's workers’ wellbeing through development interventions, etc. Besides SuPWR, she is also involved with the Countering Backlash and Reclaiming Gender Justice Programme. For SuPWR, Pragyna will be working with the Antisexual Harassment Movement by Jahangirnagar University students in the community space; and the Movement for the Elimination of Domestic Violence in the family space.

Rubina has been working at CARE Nepal since January 2022 as a Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer – Database Management. She began her journey in SuPWR as a qualitative data coder using Nvivo but has since learned so much more - being a part of the research has given  Rubina a deeper understanding of women’s social movements, especially in the context of Nepal. Rubina's role in CARE Nepal mostly involves working with quantitative data but the unique methodology of the SuPWR reflective workshops have shown her the importance of being conscious of the people behind the data that we collect.

Saba is a graduate from the MA Poverty and Development cohort at the IDS, University of Sussex. For her dissertation, Saba examined human-infrastructure relationships and patterns of peripheralisation in Karachi’s informal settlements. Before joining the IDS, she was a researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi where she assisted researchers in projects relating to women’s work in agriculture, the political economy of the Benazir Income Support Programme, and service delivery in Karachi’s informal settlements. For the SuPWR project, Saba is working with IDEAS to study feminist struggles within the market and state spaces in Pakistan. Saba is also interested in exploring social marginality in urban environments through the lens of infrastructures.

Sujeena Shakya works as a Knowledge Management Specialist with CARE Nepal, and is responsible for creating and supporting knowledge management process, systems and products of CARE Nepal programs/projects, providing support to programmatic learning in order to enhance the quality and impact of work. As a core team member of SuPWR, Sujeena will be responsible for GPEA analysis, data collection and analysis.