Professional Experience:
I am a feminist policy expert and a human rights defender from the global South. I have over 20 years of advocacy experience working at the international, regional and national levels, developing innovative strategies, and building feminist leadership and movements, through extensive networking and organising across diverse sectors and regions. These include women’s organizations, labour unions, policy makers, governments, and academia.
I have successfully lead several advocacy initiatives through collective action, facilitated formation of diverse alliances, and have systematically mentored a next generation of feminist leadership to amplify our struggles to address all forms of inequalities and oppressions, to support women’s ability to have control over their bodies, participate in decision making processes, to have equal access and control over productive resources and to celebrate our lives.
In addition, I bring thematic expertise on economic, social and cultural rights with a particular focus on the right to work, rights at work (fair and just conditions of work), right to social security, right to livelihoods, right to productive resources including right to land, corporate accountability, and environmental justice from a global South feminist perspective.
As the Executive Director of Programme on Women’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (PWESCR), I strived to build south feminist leadership and women’s networks with the capacity to monitor and advocate strategies by engendering policy, law and practice at local, national, regional and international levels. In the last ten years, PWESCR has established itself as a credible organization. We now have three registered offices, and our network spans over three continents (Latin America and Caribbean, Africa and Asia) in over 40 countries in the South with links to North America and Europe.
PWESCR has successfully opened policy spaces for south feminist analysis in various platforms. Of course these are small steps towards our journey for rights, equality and justice for all. In these 12 years as an organisation we started with a small planning grant and have now worked with over 13 donors with several repeat donors with multi-year funding and we grew from a small team of three to a team of 15 dedicated staff.
I was previously at the Ford Foundation in New York, US, and assisted the Foundation in its grant-making in the areas of international human rights; women’s rights and gender equity; and international economic policy. I provided programmatic and analytical support for grant-making for the sum of $15 million each year.
Prior to the Ford Foundation, at UNIFEM (United Nation’s Development Funds for Women) (now UN Women) I worked on violence against women and coordinated UNIFEM’s work in Afghanistan. As a consultant to the Center for Women's Global Leadership, I organised a women's rights hearing at the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa.