Josephine Akhire

Josephine Ahikire is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University, Kampala and affiliated to the Centre for Basic Research (Kampala) as a senior Research fellow. Ahikire has worked on feminist political theory and has conducted research and widely published in the area of gendered constructions of public politics, labour and popular culture, including a forthcoming book on the gender politics of decentralisation in Uganda.

Nadje Al-Ali

Nadje Al-Ali is a social anthropologist working at the new Centre for Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. She is specialized in women and gender issues in the Middle East, especially women’s movements and activism in Egypt and Iraq. She has also been working on the gendered aspects of transnational migration and diaspora mobilization with special reference to Bosnia and Iraq. Her publications include Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (Zed Books 2007); Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2000) and New Approaches to Migration (ed. Routledge, 2002) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Most recently, she has co-authored a book entitled What kind of Liberation? Women, Gender and Political Transition in Iraq (University of California Press, forthcoming). Nadje Al-Ali considers herself an activist academic and is a founding member of Act Together: Women’s Action on Iraq. Act Together is a London-based group of Iraqi and British women raising consciousness about the effect of war and occupation on women and gender relations in Iraq (www.acttogether.org). She is also a member of Women in Black UK.

Lydia Alpízar Durán

Lydia Alpízar Durán - Executive Director, Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Lydia is a Costa Rican feminist activist who lives in Mexico City. She participated actively in youth organizing and mobilization around the Earth Summit process in 1991-1992 and worked for several years as coordinator of the Youth Programme of the Earth Council. She facilitated the participation of young women from Latin America in the Beijing 95 process, coordinating an international project called "Our words, our voices: young women for change. Young women voices beyond Beijing '95". Lydia is co-founder and advisor of ELIGE - Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights (Mexico), and she is also co-founder of the Latin American and Caribbean Youth Network for Reproductive and Sexual Rights. Since 1996, she has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Committee for the Peace Council. She is member of the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women and the Central American’s Women’s Fund and she is also on the Board of the International Council on Human Rights Policy, based in Geneva. In 2000, Lydia was the Latin American regional representative to the International NGO Committee for Beijing +5. She was part for several years of the coordinating team of the Campaign "Stop Impunity: No more murdered women", a national Mexican initiative to put an end to the killings of women in the US/Mexico border city of Ciudad Juárez. Lydia is a Sociologist and a former participant of the 2003 Human Rights Advocates Training Program of the Center for the Study of Human Rights, at Columbia University. She has extensive experience in advocacy and training on women's human rights, particularly in sexual and reproductive rights and violence against women. Before becoming AWID’s Executive Director, Lydia was the Manager of the Feminist Movements and Organizations Program.

Srilatha Batliwala

Srilatha Batliwala is an India-based Civil Society Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University, where her work focuses on transnational civil society, but she is best known for her work on gender equality and women’s empowerment.  She is Chair of the Board of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization, and a member of the Board of PLAN International and Gender at Work. Srilatha has over 25 years’ experience as a grassroots activist, gender equality advocate, and women’s studies teacher and researcher in India and internationally.  She is well known in South Asia for her leadership of large-scale empowerment movements (such as SPARC and Mahila Samakhya) that mobilized and empowered thousands of the poorest women and communities in both urban and rural areas in India.  Srilatha has published extensively on a range of women’s issues, including the widely translated and used “Women’s Empowerment in South Asia – Concepts and Practices.”  She has just published, with co-editor L. David Brown, an edited volume entitled “Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction” (Kumarian Press, August 2006) which helps lay readers understand the role and history of the major transnational social movements - labour, environment, women’s, human rights, economic justice and peace movements - that have impacted the world.

Sarah Bradshaw

Middlesex University, UK

Uma Chakravarti

Uma Chakravarti teaches history at Miranda House, Delhi University. She has worked on both ancient and modern India, and written on issues of caste, labour and gender.

Andrea Cornwall

Andrea Cornwall is a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. A social anthropologist by training, she works on participatory governance, sexuality and rights, and is the Director of the DFID-funded Research Programme Consortium Pathways of Women’s Empowerment. Her publications include the edited collections Realizing Rights: Transforming Approaches to Sexual and Reproductive Wellbeing (with Alice Welbourn, Zed, 2002), Feminisms and Development: Challenges, Contestations and Contradictions (with Elizabeth Harrison and Ann Whitehead, Zed, 2006) and The Politics of Rights: Dilemmas for Feminist Praxis (with Maxine Molyneux, Third World Quarterly, 2006).

Diane Elson

Diane Elson a professor in sociology at the University of Essex. She came to Essex in 2000 from a Chair in Development Studies at Manchester University, via two years in New York working for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). Her current research and teaching interests are in global social change and the realisation of human rights with a particular focus on gender inequality. Her recent publications include: ed. Male Bias in the Development Process (1995); co-ed. special issues of World Development on Gender, Adjustment and Macroeconomics (1995) and Growth, Trade, Finance and Gender Inequality (2000); UNIFEM Report on Progress of the World's Women (2000) and Socializing Markets, Not Market Socialism, Socialist Register (1999/2000).

Rosalind Eyben

Rosalind Eyben is a Research Fellow and Team Leader of the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies. Her research interests include power and relationships in international aid, organisational learning and change, gender equality and women's empowerment, rights-based approaches, social analysis. Her recent publications include: The Power of Labelling (ed. with Joy Moncrieffe), 2007, London: Earthscan and Relationships for Aid (ed.), 2006, London: Earthscan. She is also Convenor for the Global Hub of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC.

Jasmine Gideon

Jasmine Gideon is a social scientist and a Lecturer in Development Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her recent research is on gender and social protection in Chile and her work on informal workers' access to health care has been published in Global Social Policy and Bulletin of Latin American Research. Other research interests include gender and social and economic rights and looking at health sector reform from a gender perspective. Recent publications include ‘Integrating Gender Issues into Health Policy’, Development and Change, 2006, 37 (2) and ‘Accessing Economic and Social Rights Under Neoliberalism: gender and rights in Chile’, Third World Quarterly, 2006, 27 (7).  

Shalmali Guttal

Shalmali Guttal is a Senior Associate with Focus on the Global South (Focus), an activist think tank that monitors development policy and practice. Over the past 20 years, she has lived and worked in India, the USA, and mainland SE Asia on social, economic, and political justice issues. At Focus, she has been involved with research, writing, and campaign building on a range of subjects including land and natural resources, privatisation, trade, debt, poverty, and development.

Homa Hoodfar

Homa Hoodfar, Ph.D. Social Anthropology (University of Kent at Canterbury), Professor.  Dr. Hoodfar has conducted field research on development and social change issues in Egypt and Iran, with an emphasis on gender, households, work and international migration in the Middle East. Further key research areas are women and Islam, and codification of Muslim family laws in the Middle East, Muslim dress code in diaspora, and the impact of long term forced migration on family structure and gender relations on Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan. She has authored or edited, and co-edited a series of books: 'Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo'; The Muslim Veil in North America: issues and debates (co-edited with Sajida Alvi and Sheila McDonough); 'Building Civil Societies: A Guide for Social and Political Participation (with Nelofer Pazira).

Shireen Huq

Shireen Huq is an activist in the women’s movement in Bangladesh, a founder member of Naripokkho, and for the last over 20 years, a trainer on gender, rights and development in Bangladesh and elsewhere. She has also worked from 1987 to 2001, as Adviser, Women’s Development and during 2003-2006 as Deputy Programme Coordinator, Human Rights and Good Governance Programme for Danida in Bangladesh.

Deniz Kandityoti

Deniz has taught and researched in universities in Turkey, the USA and Britain. Her research interests include comparative perspectives on gender, household formation and development, and Islam and state policies in the Middle East. More recently she has been working in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR on post-Soviet transitions with special reference to land rights and agrarian reform. She has done consultancy work for UNDP, ILO, UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), DFID and UNIFEM. She was also a British Council consultant for a World Bank project and edits Central Asian Survey. She holds degrees from the University of Paris, Sorbonne (BSc) and London (LSE; MSc and PhD).

Naila Kabeer

Naila Kabeer is a social economist specialising in gender, poverty, and social policy issues. Her main areas of research have been in South and South east Asia. She has also been active in developing frameworks and methodologies for integrating gender concerns into policy and planning and has substantial experience of training and advisory work with governments, bilateral and, multilateral agencies and NGOs She managed the DFID funded Social Policy Programme and the DFID-funded Mainstreaming Poverty and Gender in the Gambia Project and is currently a convenor on the Development Research Centre on Citizenship at the IDS. She is also a member of the Global Advisory Team on the Ford Foundation's Global Impact Evaluation of Microfinance Programmes.

Rose Mensah-Kutin

Rose Mensah-Kutin is the Regional Programme Manager of ABANTU for Development, a gender-oriented NGO working on the relationships between policies and gender equality in Africa. She holds a PhD in Gender and Energy from the University of Birmingham, U.K. Her main research interest is on the implication of technologies on gender relations in rural households and communities in Ghana. She worked in Ghana’s energy policy sector for years as a socio-economic analyst on energy issues. Dr. Mensah-Kutin is also a professional journalist with expertise on gender and development issues.

Takyiwaa Manuh

Takyiwaa Manuh is the Director of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. Her research interests include women’s rights and empowerment issues and the state, gender and women in Africa. Her recent publications include: Africa After Gender? (ed. with Catherine Cole and Stephan Miescher) Indiana University Press, 2007 and At Home in the World?: International Migration and Development in Contemporary Ghana and West Africa (ed.) Michigan State University Press, 2006. She is Convenor of the West African Hub of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC.

Rachel Masika

Rachel Masika is a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College and an independent gender and development consultant.  Her recent assignments have focussed on the gendered dimensions of institutional and organizational change, macro-economic policies and climate change for organizations including the UN, British Council and Oxfam.  She has a varied background in development, working for the Institute of Development Studies (both teaching and researching gender and development) and CAFOD (Franco-phone West Africa programming) as well as editing the international journal, Gender and Development, published by Oxfam.  She has also been involved in promoting corporate community involvement at Business in the Community and community service development at CSV and has also worked in the private sector for Freshfields Brukhaus Deringer, Banque Nationale de Paris, KPMG and Clifford Chance.  She has edited books and written articles and policy briefings on the following sectors and themes from a gender perspective: health, education, employment, sustainable livelihoods, environment, climate change, human trafficking, infrastructure development and urban poverty.  Her current research interests include: gendered impacts and outcomes of information and communication and technology access and use and; addressing the gendered risks and costs of climate change. 

Maxine Molyneux

Maxine Molyneux is Professor of Sociology at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, where she directs a Masters Degree in Globalization and Latin American Development. Her recent books include: Women's Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond. Palgrave 2000 ; Gender Justice, Development and Rights (edited  with Shahra Razavi) OUP 2002; Doing the Rights Thing: Rights-based Development and Latin American NGOs (with Sian Lazar) Intermediate Technology Group Publications, Autumn 2003; The Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America ed. (with E. Dore), Duke University Press,  2000 and Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America  ed. (with N. Craske) Palgrave 2001. Her research paper Change and Continuity in Social Protection in Latin America: Mothers at the Service of the State? has just been published by UNRISD.

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay

Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay is a social anthropologist specializing in social development with a focus on gender and development. At present she is the Area Leader for Social Development and Practice at KIT.

Charmaine Pereira

Initiative for Women's Studies in Nigeria. Charmaine is theme convenor on Changing Narratives of Sexuality for the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC.

Fenella Porter

Fenella Porter has her professional roots in the international women’s movement. In the mid 1990s she was based in Uganda, working with Isis-WICCE, running an international leadership training programme for women activists, as well as participating in the East African NGO delegation to the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

After returning to the UK, she worked with Oxfam, carrying out research and publishing books and articles on issues such as violence against women, gender and HIV/AIDS, gender and social exclusion, and gender in organisations. She has also co-edited several issues of the Oxfam journal ‘Gender and Development’. After a period of studying and having children (the studying bit funded by an ESRC CASE award), she gained her PhD in 2005, with a focus on gender and organisational learning in VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). Since then she has been a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, teaching courses on NGOs and development management.

Tej Purewal

Tej is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. She joined Sociology in 1996 when the Development Studies programme was located in the department. While Development Studies has since moved from Sociology, her teaching and research continue to look at various aspects of development while also engaging with some key areas of Sociology, such as gender, 'race' and culture. She has a multi-disciplinary background with a BA in Political Science from Vassar College, an MA in Area Studies, South Asia (SOAS/London) and a PhD in Development Studies (Lancaster). Her research interests include: cultural politics of son preference and gender, state; society and culture in South Asia with respect to the partition and the Indo-Pak border; and poverty and urban housing in South Asia.

Hazel Reeves

Hazel is Manager of BRIDGE at IDS. She has researched, written and lectured on a wide range of gender and development themes for academic and policymaker audiences, including on gender budget initiatives and representations of gender in NGO advertising. Hazel represents BRIDGE within the gender and development network of the OECD/DAC (Gendernet). She draws on years of management and marketing experience (academic and professional) including undertaking consultancies for charities, NGOs, and donor agencies (including UN agencies). She is also a director/trustee of One World Action, a UK-based NGO that focuses on supporting gender, participation and governance initiatives in the Global South.

Penny Vera-Sanso

Penny Vera-Sanso is an anthropologist. Since 1989 she has undertaken research into the determinants of household and inter-generational relations in urban and rural South India.  She teaches development studies at Birkbeck College and convenes the DSA's ageing and development study group.

Lea Santana

Lea is Communications Officer at the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC Latin America Hub at NEIM, Brazil. She graduated in public relations and is currently studying gender and regional development.

Cecilia Sardenberg

Cecilia M.B. Sardenberg is a Brazilian feminist who holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University and has been a member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, since 1982. She was also one of the “founding mothers” of UFBA’s Women’s Studies Research Center (NEIM/UFBA), acting at present as its Director. She was also in the steering committee and served two terms as Executive Coordinator of REDOR (the Feminist Network of Women’s Studies Centers in the North and Northeast Regions) in Brazil, having also served in the Coordinating Committee of RedeFem (the Brazilian Network of Feminist Studies). She has worked extensively in the area of gender and development in Brazil, and has published several articles both in Brazil and abroad on feminist and gender studies. She is an active member of the Women’s Forum of Salvador, Bahia, has served as well in Bahia State Council on the Rights of Women, and participated in the elaboration of the Brazilian “shadow report” to the CEDAW committee. She is Convenor of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Latin America Hub.

Hania Sholkamy

Hania Sholkamy is an Egyptian anthropologist with a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, The University of London. She is currently assistant research professor at the Social Research Center of the AUC and is also affiliated with the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program of the university. Her research interests and publications are mainly in the fields of health, particularly reproductive health, gender, population and qualitative methods. She has co-edited two volumes, Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography (OUP) with S. Szreter and A. Dharmalingam and Health and Identity in Egypt (AUC press) with F. Ghanam. She has been a member of various professional associations including The Reproductive Health Working Group (current), the Committee on Anthropology and Demography of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (1998-2002) and the Advisory Committee of the Middle East Awards program of the International Population Council (2002/3). She is also a member of the executive committee of the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies of the AUC, a fellow of the Economic Research Forum, and a member of the International Faculty of the Arab Gulf University in Bahrain. She is Convenor of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Middle East Hub.

Maheen Sultan

Maheen Sultan is Coordinator of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment South Asia Hub which is part of the Development Studies Programme of BRAC University. She has been doing freelance consultancies on social development and gender issues for several years and earlier has worked in various multilateral/bilateral development agencies. She is a member of Naripokkho, a Bangladeshi women’s activist organisation. She has worked closely with the Government in the post-Beijing conference period on gender mainstreaming and CEDAW reporting. Her research interests include women’s mobilisation and organisation. She lives and works in Bangladesh and has a family with two young children.

Amina Salihu

Visiting Fellow, Institute of Development Studies and Senior Special Assistant (Information and Strategy) to Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria

Caroline Sweetman

Since 1993, Caroline Sweetman has been Editor of the international journal, 'Gender and Development', published by Oxfam GB and Taylor and Francis (Routledge).  The journal's aim is to stimulate debate among development policymakers and practitioners, and share lessons, to ensure that development practice supports gender equality and the empowerment of women. Caroline's education focused on literature and periodical journalism before she made the shift to study gender and development. She obtained her MA in Gender Analysis in Development Studies from the University of East Anglia and her PhD from the Centre for Development Studies, University of Leeds. Her doctoral thesis focused on Livelihoods, Poverty and the Empowerment of Women in Ethiopia, her husband's home country. Her fieldwork focused on the impact of an Oxfam-supported project targetting women for micro-credit, in a community of recent rural to urban migrants in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Caroline has worked as a gender policy advisor for Oxfam and other organisations in east and southern Africa including Ethiopia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.  Over the past 15 months she has been seconded as Policy Advisor to Oxfam's Policy Research Team to support gender mainstreaming in Oxfam's global advocacy and campaigning activities. Caroline lived and worked in Lesotho in the early 1990s, for local NGOs and UN agencies, on media-based development projects. This experience - and her career in Oxfam - has given her the opportunity to listen and learn about women's real lives, and critique the lack of 'fit' between these realities and the development interventions offered by both neo-liberal and 'alternative' development.

Laura Turquet

Women's Rights Officer, ActionAid UK

Vivienne Wee

Vivienne Wee is Associate Professor at the City University, Hong Kong. She is Associate Director of the South East Asia Research Centre and Director of the DFID funded RPC on Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts.

Kalpana Wilson

Kalpana Wilson has a background in political economy and has researched and published work on agrarian transformation, neo-liberalism and rural labour movements in Bihar, India. Her current research interests include the relationships between ‘race’, imperialism and discourses of development, and questions of gender and agency in rural labour movements. She teaches development studies at Birkbeck, (University of London) focussing on gender, ‘race’, war and conflict, and is currently a Research Associate in Development Studies at SOAS. Her recent relevant publications include ‘ “Agency” : from Missionaries to Micro-credit’ in The Impact of Feminism on Political Concepts and Debates, eds. Georgina Blakeley and Valerie Bryson, Manchester University Press(forthcoming) and ‘Who are the “community”? The World Bank and Agrarian Power in Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.XLI No.1, 2006. She is a founder member of the South Asia Solidarity Group and Asian Women Unite! has also been involved for many years in campaigning work on issues around racism in Britain.

Prudence Woodford-Berger

Prudence Woodford-Berger is a social anthropologist, with ethnographic field research experience in West Africa, primarily from work on matriliny and gender in Brong-Ahafu, Ghana. She has worked as a consultant and policy adviser in Swedish international development cooperation work since 1978 on issues concerning women and gender in development. Prudence is presently a senior special adviser on social and gender equality issues at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Department for Development Policy in Stockholm. She is the author of "Gender Mainstreaming: what is it (about) and should be continue doing it?" in Feminisms in Development - Contradictions, Contestations and Challenges (eds. A. Cornwall, E. Harrison, A. Whitehead), London: Zed Books, 2007.