
Our team
The SuPWR project draws together a multi-disciplinary research team with extensive in-country and conceptual expertise on women's rights and contemporary power struggles in South Asia.

Deepta Chopra
Principal Investigator
Institute of Development Studies
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
Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Bangladesh)
BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
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).

Maryam S. Khan
Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Pakistan)
Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives
Maryam is the Country Lead for SuPWR in Pakistan. She is a resident Research Fellow at IDEAS, and presently an SJD (Doctor of Juridical Science) candidate at the University of Wisconsin Law School, USA. Maryam's published works and ongoing research focus on post-colonial themes of South Asian legal studies, including comparative constitutionalism, law and social movements, law and globalisation, judicial activism, and sociology of the legal profession. Her work has appeared in several international law journals and edited volumes on law and socio-legal studies. She is currently also working on an oral history project on the making of Pakistan’s Constitution.

Mona Sherpa
Co-Investigator & Country Lead (Nepal)
CARE Nepal
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
Co-Investigator & Country Lead (India)
Institute of Social Studies Trust
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 Khan Mohmand
Co-Investigator
Institute of Development Studies
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 Nazneen
Co-Investigator
Institute of Development Studies
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.

Aimen
Lead Researcher
Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives
Aimen is a researcher. She has taught feminist theory at Beaconhouse National University and is currently at the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She also has six years of experience working in the development sector in Pakistan. Aimen is the lead researcher in Pakistan for the SuPWR project, working with the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS).

Anjam Singh
Research Consultant
CARE Nepal
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
Research Fellow
Institute of Social Studies Trust
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 Rajkarnikar
Communications Officer
CARE Nepal
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 Shahid
Communications and Outreach Lead
Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives
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 West
Project Manager
Institute of Development Studies
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
Researcher
BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
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 Murphy
Communications Officer
Institute of Development Studies
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.

Nirmala Maharjan
Co-lead researcher (Nepal)
CARE Nepal
Nirmala Maharjan is development practitioner, currently working as Gender Equity Diversity and Social Norms Specialist in CARE Nepal. Nirmala has more than eight years of experience in development sector, with specialisation in areas of gender equality, social inclusion, social norms, community development and humanitarian crisis management. She is a core research team member of SuPWR research project and has been closely involved in major research activities including Gendered Political Economy Analysis (GPEA), data collection, and reflective workshops and coding. |

Pragyna Mahpara
Research Associate
BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
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.

Priya Raghavan
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Institute of Development Studies
Priya is the post-doctoral researcher for SuPWR, responsible for the data management, coordination between different country teams, and supporting the analysis and writing of project outputs. She has a PhD in Gender Studies from the LSE, and her thesis examined dominant discourses of sexual violence in post-colonial India.

Rubina Lama Ghising
Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer
CARE Nepal
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 Aslam
Researcher
Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives
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.

Samreen Mushtaq
Post-doctoral Researcher
Institute of Development Studies
Samreen is the post-doctoral researcher for SuPWR at the Institute of Development Studies, responsible for coordinating between country teams, supporting data management, analysis, and writing, and collating varied writing outputs. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her broader research interests primarily focus on gendered contours of militarisation and its’ intimate incursions into women’s lives and spaces in the context of Kashmir. She has previously worked at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ashoka University.

Sujeena Shakya
Knowledge Management Specialist
CARE Nepal
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.
International Advisory Board

Anne Marie Goetz
New York University
Anne Marie Goetz is an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. Dr. Goetz is a Clinical Professor at the New York University (NYU) School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs (CGA). She is a political scientist who has researched democratisation and good governance reforms (including anti-corruption) in India, Bangladesh, and Uganda. She has also researched conflict resolution and peacebuilding in Myanmar and the Philippines. She has worked as a policy director on issues of governance and women, peace and security at UN Women and UNIFEM.

Naomi Hossain
American University
Naomi Hossain is an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. Naomi is currently a Research Professor at the Accountability Research Center at the School of International Service at the American University. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. Naomi researches the politics of development, often in Bangladesh, with a focus on understanding how people living with poverty and precarity get the public services they need. Her work increasingly focuses on accountability for disasters and crises and on the role of protest in holding public authorities to account.

Mala Htun
University of New Mexico
Mala Htun is an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. She is Professor of Political Science, co-PI and deputy director of ADVANCE at UNM, and special advisor for inclusion and climate in the School of Engineering at the University of New Mexico. She works on women’s rights, social inequalities, and strategies to promote inclusion and diversity.

Niraja Gopal Jayal
London School of Economics
Niraja Gopal Jayal is an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. Niraja Gopal Jayal is Centennial Professor at the LSE Department of Gender Studies and Avantha Professor at the King’s India Institute, King’s College, London. Professor Jayal undertakes research in the fields of citizenship, democracy and welfare in India.

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay
KIT Royal Tropical Institute
Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay is an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. Dr Mukhopadhyay, a social anthropologist, is among the first generation of gender trainers and advocates and has worked for three decades internationally on gender and development. Based at KIT (Royal Tropical Institute) Amsterdam from 1996 – 2017 she founded a team specialising on gender and development, undertook research, advisory work, teaching and training. She remains an associate at KIT.

Georgina Waylen
University of Manchester
Professor Georgina Waylen serves as an International Advisory Board member for SuPWR. Georgina is a British political scientist, specialising in comparative politics, political economy, and gender and politics. Since April 2012, she has been Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester.