Wajahat Afzal is a graduate from Lahore University of Management Sciences and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Instructional Technology and Media from Teacher’s College, Columbia University, USA. Wajahat specialises in designing and testing innovative pedagogical practices and conducting research and evaluation of educational programmes.
Susana Araujo is a Research Officer at the Institute of Development Studies, UK, working on projects related to governance, gender, and politics. She is currently doing her PhD on the politics of backlash and the dynamics of movements and counter-movements around gender equality in Peru. Previously, she worked as a Technical Advisor for UN Women and as a projects officer for the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation. Susana is a governance and gender specialist with over 16 years’ experience in Latin America within the international development sector, working with multi- and bilateral agencies as well as civil society organisations.
Shukria Azadmanesh is a Research Officer at the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). She has a BA in English Language and Literature and is pursuing an MA in International Law. Shukria has been working in research since 2009. She has also worked as the coordinator of a women’s leadership development programme. Shukria is AREU’s focal point for gender-related projects and has worked on transitional justice, girls’ education, child migration, the political economy of education, health service delivery, violence against women in elections, women’s political participation, and livelihood-related projects. She has co-authored several research papers, taken part in many research projects, and led research projects as a local researcher.
Lena Morgon Banks is an Assistant Professor with the International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her primary research focus is on disability, poverty, and social protection. She is a mixed methods researcher who has worked on a number of projects on disability, including the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)-funded Programme for Evidence to Inform Disability Action (PENDA), which is evaluating several interventions that aim to improve the wellbeing of people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries.
Bradley Carpenter is a scientist working in the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. He has an MA in Research Psychology from the University of the Western Cape and is currently completing his PhD. His interests include research design, analysis techniques, disability, mental health, and individualised treatment.
Estefanía Charvet is Head of Programmes at Southern Voice where she oversees the implementation of research projects. Before joining Southern Voice, Estefanía worked for research organisations and thinktanks in South America and Europe. She was responsible for conducting research on political inclusion, gender, participation, and accountability. Estefanía has an MA in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute, Geneva and a BA in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador.
Deepta Chopra is a feminist social scientist, leading the work of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) on women’s empowerment and unpaid care. Her research interests focus on gendered political economy analysis of policies for the empowerment of women and girls, and its core links with unpaid care work. She has developed and implemented several research projects on social protection and economic empowerment of women and girls, with a focus on South Asia. Deepta has extensive experience of research with informal women workers and poor women in rural areas through qualitative research design and methodologies.
Amanda Clyde is a Research Technologist at the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. She is a Research Assistant for the Forgotten Agenda study which focuses on sexual and reproductive health and rights for young women with disabilities under the Covid-19 pandemic. She particularly focused on the participants who were deaf and conducted interviews using sign language. Previously Amanda studied sign language and later worked for the iCAN Corporate Disability Solutions institution in Durban where she taught deaf students. Her focus was teaching business practice which was taught in full sign language.
Arjan de Haan is Senior Program Specialist at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), based in Ottawa. His current work focuses on supporting Southern‑based research that integrates climate and gender equity considerations into policy analysis, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and for sustained recoveries and transitions to low-carbon economies. He previously led the IDRC Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) project on women’s economic empowerment, and published and taught on social policy in development contexts, labour migration, social inequalities, and the ‘aid industry’.
Vidya Diwakar is a mixed methods researcher with over a decade of experience working in universities and thinktanks, most recently with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. Her research focuses on gender-disaggregated drivers of sustained escapes from poverty, and the role of armed conflict and fragility in creating poverty traps. Vidya has authored and reviewed a range of reports, book chapters, and journal articles on these topics, and led large multi-partner policy-oriented research and evaluation projects on poverty dynamics in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Eastern and Western Africa for international agencies.
Kristin Dunkle is a Chief Specialist Scientist in the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. She is a social epidemiologist who has been working on gender-based violence and health for over 20 years, and has published widely on connections between intimate partner violence and HIV among both women and men; links between gender-based violence, transactional sex, and poverty; intimate partner violence; sexual violence and health among men who have sex with men (MSM), and others in LGBTQIA communities.
Stanley Dzimadzi is Community Data for Change Officer at the non-profit organisation Centre for Community Organization and Development (CCODE) Malawi.
Max Gallien is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK and a Fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), UK. He is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of development, and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa.
John Ganle is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ghana. His research combines social science and public health theories and methods to examine topics including disability, sexuality, and reproductive health.
Ihsanullah Ghafoori works as a Research Manager at the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). He has a BA in Islamic Studies from Peshawar and a BA in Law and Political Science from Rana University, Kabul. He has extensive experience in the field of qualitative and quantitative research. Ihsanullah has played an active role in livelihood trajectories, local governance, and urban governance at AREU. His research has contributed to a water management study under the theme of natural resource management. He has also co-authored several studies and contributed to many research programmes.
Shaffa Hameed is an Assistant Professor at the International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She is a qualitative researcher who has worked on capturing the in-depth experiences of people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries including Maldives and Turkey. Her interests also include the sexual and reproductive health and rights of people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries.
Jill Hanass-Hancock is a Senior Specialist Scientist at the South African Medical Research Council. Her work is focused on the sexual and reproductive health and rights of vulnerable populations in Southern Africa including women, youth and adolescents, and people with disabilities. Jill is best known for her contributions to the understanding of the sexual and reproductive health needs of people with disabilities using a variety of research approaches including ethnography, epidemiology, situation and policy analysis techniques, and the development, piloting, and evaluation of several tailored interventions in the health and education sector.
Lopita Huq studied cultural anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York and political studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is a Research Fellow at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University. She conducts qualitative research on norms and practices related to women’s work, marriage, education, adolescence, sexual harassment, and disabilities. Her interests include digitalisation, grass-roots mobilisation, citizenship, and rights. She also engages with the audiovisual medium. Her recent publications include Material Barriers, Cultural Boundaries: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Gender and Labour Market Segmentation in Bangladesh (UNU-WIDER Working Paper 2021-69, co-authored with Naila Kabeer and M.M. Rahaman).
Zeynep İlkkurşun is a psychologist and sociologist, and currently an MA student in Koç University’s Clinical Psychology Programme, Istanbul. She is particularly interested in psychological trauma and the mental health of vulnerable populations. She was involved in two Horizon 2020-funded projects which are the RE-DEFINE project and the STRENGTHS project as a research assistant. She is currently working as a researcher in the Turkey site of the Covid Collective Covid-19 & Disability study.
Gakeemah Inglis-Jassiem is a physiotherapist with a keen interest and experience in the rehabilitation of neurological dysfunction. She is enrolled as a PhD candidate and has received funding from the South African National Research Foundation and the South African Medical Research Council (Bongani Mayosi National Health Scholars Programme). Her PhD project investigates technology to enhance contextually relevant stroke care in South Africa. She is a part-time researcher in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Stellenbosch University, which investigates rehabilitation in Africa. She is one of the contributors to the book entitled, Collaborative Capacity Development to Complement Stroke Rehabilitation in Africa (2020, AOSIS).
Nusrat Jahan leads the knowledge management team at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University, develops and implements communication strategies for effective stakeholder engagement, and oversees the quality of BIGD’s external communication. Before joining BIGD, Nusrat worked as a Research Coordinator at the Bangladesh office of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) for three years and was involved with fundraising, advocacy, and research communication. Previously, she worked for five years with Traidcraft Exchange – a UK‑based charity – as a Programme Manager. Nusrat has an MA in Public Administration-Development Practice from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, USA.
Umair Javed is Assistant Professor in Politics and Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and a Research Fellow at the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre (MHRC), Pakistan. His research focuses on informality, social transformation, and politics and development in urban South Asia.
Salman Khan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Durham University, UK. He was previously Research Associate at the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre (MHRC) at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His dissertation ethnographically traces the interventions of Covid-19 as an actor in the enactment of everyday life practices, focusing upon ‘at risk’ populations such as cab drivers. He is particularly interested in how entanglements of effect, socio-technical networks, and time–space produce uneven geographies of risk in our everyday interactions with Covid-19.
Rifat Shahpar Khan studied literature at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is a Research Coordinator at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University. Her areas of interest include disability and rights, child safeguarding, social inclusion, inclusive education, gender transformative programming, public health, child labour, and policy advocacy. She has experience in both qualitative and quantitative research. Previously, she worked at Sightsavers, AusAID (Dhaka), Humanity & Inclusion, and ActionAid. She co-authored Defining Disability: A Guideline for Medical Doctors and Primary Health Care Workforce (2019, Non-Communicable Disease Control Programme, Directorate General of Health Services, Bangladesh).
Shandana Khan Mohmand is a social scientist in the Governance cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. Her main area of research is the political economy of public policy and service delivery, focused mainly on empirical analyses of democratisation, local politics, and informal institutions. Her research has increasingly focused on the relationship between political participation, inequality, and accountability. She has contributed to both policy and social science research, using varied methodological strategies to investigate these issues in South Asia, the Western Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Paul Knipe is Director of Consultancy, Impact and Influence at INTRAC. His interests include knowledge brokering, accompanied learning, and locally led approaches to influence policymaking and strengthen civil society. Before joining INTRAC, Paul ran research, knowledge translation, and learning initiatives at the Institute of Development Studies, including the Knowledge, Evidence and Learning for Development programme (K4D). He worked in Myanmar and Sri Lanka for seven years as a VSO volunteer, as Country Representative with Democracy Reporting International, and as Deputy Officer-in-Charge at Myanmar Institute for Integrated Development.
Kate Lines is an independent research and communications consultant based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She has a background in urban development planning and management and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. Her research interests relate to pro‑poor urban development and she has collaborated with Slum Dwellers International (SDI) affiliates for several years to explore the ways in which professional communication and documentation can add value to the work of grass-roots urban social movements.
Mercilene Machisa focuses on gender-based violence (GBV) in Southern Africa. She has led GBV surveys and qualitative sub-studies in six countries; evaluated the health sector and criminal justice response to sexual violence in South Africa; elucidated the complex structural pathways and intersections between mental ill-health and GBV in Gauteng, South Africa; and conducted formative research, developed, and piloted the Ntombi Vimbela!, a sexual violence risk reduction intervention in South African Higher Education settings. As an honorary lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Public Health, she supports postgraduate students in conducting GBV and sexual and reproductive health and rights research.
Imran Matin is the Executive Director of the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), a research and postgraduate education institute at BRAC University. He leads BIGD with a mission to generate high-quality evidence and insights based on field research on governance and development challenges and interventions. Prior to his current role, he worked with BRAC, Save the Children International, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Imran has a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex, UK.
Diana Mitlin is Professor of Global Urbanism at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK. She is also Research Associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and editor of IIED’s journal, Environment and Urbanization. From 2020, Diana has been CEO of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)-funded African Cities Research Consortium.
Nomfundo Mthethwa is a Research Technologist at the South African Medical Research Council and has an MA in Medical Science. Her work focuses on disability, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and gender-based violence. Nomfundo is a project coordinator of the Breaking the Silence Intervention, a project which focuses on access to SRHR for people with disabilities, and includes an evidence-informed curriculum innovation approach to enable educators to provide comprehensive sexuality education in accessible formats. She is also involved the Forgotten Agenda study focusing on young women with disabilities under Covid-19.
Patience Mudimu-Matsangaise is Executive Director of Dialogue on Shelter Trust, a non-governmental organisation in Zimbabwe that works in partnership with networks of urban and peri-urban communities in informal settlements. The partnership is an affiliate of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a transnational network of slum dwellers federations centred around the urban poor in 33 countries and over 200 cities across the global South. The focus of the partnership is to create inclusive communities and cities through supporting social cohesion among marginalised communities. Patience anchors her current work on experience gained in urban development work in Zimbabwe in different capacities over the past 20 years.
Orzala Nemat is an internationally known Afghan scholar and thinktank leader. She is an expert in political ethnography, with a PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and an MSc in Development Planning from University College London (UCL). Orzala has over two decades of experience in development practice, activism, women’s rights, and research and leads the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), Afghanistan’s top research thinktank in the Central Asia region and Afghanistan. She provides regular analysis through her writings, talks, media appearances, and scholarly work on conflict, development, and gender.
Ayanda Nzuza is a Research Technologist at the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. She is Project Coordinator for the Forgotten Agenda study which focuses on sexual and reproductive health and rights for young women with and without disabilities under the Covid-19 pandemic. She has an honours degree in Public Policy and a junior degree in Industrial Psychology and Sociology. Previously, Ayanda coordinated the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) Initiatives Programme which focused on understanding social and motivational factors of participating in HIV vaccine and monoclonal antibody trials in KwaZulu-Natal. She is a co‑author of several publications.
Andrea Ordóñez is Director of Southern Voice, a network of 59 thinktanks from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia, leveraging Southern evidence and analysis to promote fair global development debates. An economist by training, Andrea was previously Research Director at Grupo FARO, a thinktank in Ecuador. Her main research interests are social policy, public finance, financing for development, and international cooperation. Her aim is to ensure that new voices and ideas from the global South are heard across regions.
Maha Noor Qureshi is a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She completed her BSc in Anthropology and Sociology in 2020. Maha is currently working as a Research Assistant at the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre (MHRC), Lahore, Pakistan.
Atiya Rahman is an Associate Research Fellow with six years’ experience in evaluating development interventions, including BRAC’s flagship programmes – the Ultra-Poor Graduation Programme, Skill Development Programme, and Urban Development Programme. She was involved with experimental research to evaluate BRAC’s graduation approaches towards poverty alleviation and quasi-experimental research to assess the impact of entrepreneurship or skills training. She has published in peer-reviewed journals based on her research on BRAC programmes, including Enterprise, Development & Microfinance, and Review of Development Economics. She has also published working papers, reports, newspaper articles, and blogs. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of East Anglia, UK.
Hossain Zillur Rahman has an MA in Economics (Dhaka University), a PhD in Political Sociology (Manchester University, UK), and is Founder-Chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was Lead Consultant on the government’s poverty reduction strategy (2005), a member of the Independent South Asian Commission on Poverty Alleviation (2003–06), and Commerce and Education Advisor (cabinet minister) in the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh (2007–08). He is currently Chairperson, BRAC Bangladesh. He is also the co-author of Rethinking Rural Poverty (1995, SAGE) and Social Protection in Bangladesh (2014, University Press).
Vinodkumar Rao works at the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), a non-governmental organisation based in India committed to supporting slum dwellers against forced evictions and grass-roots organisation of women from cities in India. Vinodkumar’s work and that of SPARC involves undertaking research and action around issues faced by the urban poor living and working in informality. Together, the network pushes for action by governments to address issues of the urban poor, primarily around rightful access to safe habitats and public services.
Emma Sanchez-Swaren was a Program Officer with the Democratic and Inclusive Governance Division of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Her work has focused on promoting gender equity, particularly in contexts affected by conflict and migration, and on positioning research for uptake. She continues to work on issues of moving evidence to impact.
Junior Alves Sebbanja is Project Manager for the Kampala Jinja Expressway – No One Worse Off project at ACTogether Uganda, which is funded by the African Development Bank and European Union through the Cities Alliance. He has a BA in Urban and Regional Planning from Makerere University, Uganda. Previously, Junior worked with urban planning consultancy firms before moving into the civil society organisation workspace through the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) network. His interests in work lie in urban design, urban and regional planning, community-based project planning and management.
Queen Seketi is a PhD student at the University of Zambia. She has a BA in Development Studies and an MA in Public Health (MPH) in Population Studies from the University of Zambia. A former National United Nations Volunteer, now working under the Local Government Service Commission, she has more than 15 years’ experience in the HIV and AIDS sector, to plan, build capacity, and facilitate multisectoral responses to HIV and AIDS at district level. Her PhD research will focus on the Covid-19 and disability nexus.
Tom Shakespeare is Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-director of the International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED). He was formerly in the Disability and Rehabilitation team at the World Health Organization where he contributed to the World Report on Disability (2011, WHO), and, among other publications, is author of Disability Rights and Wrongs (2006, Routledge).
Tracey Smythe is a physiotherapist and epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) research portfolio advances knowledge on developing and testing interventions to improve the health and wellbeing of people with disabilities. She has a particular interest in providing evidence to inform interventions for children with disabilities and their families in resource-constrained settings.
Shafaq Sohail is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin, USA. She completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Sociology from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2019.
Peter Taylor is Director of Research at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. Previously he was lead on strategy development and the Think Tank Initiative, at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada; an IDS Research Fellow; Education Technical Advisor with Helvetas, Vietnam; Lecturer in Agricultural Education at the University of Reading; and Head of Agriculture in a rural secondary school, Botswana. His research interests are organisational development and capacity strengthening, evaluation, and participatory and social change processes. As Programme Lead of the Covid Collective, he co-edited a 2021 IDS Bulletin on ‘Building a Better World: The Crisis and Opportunity of Covid-19’.
Shailaja Tetali has been an Associate Professor with the Public Health Foundation of India, Indian Institute of Public Health-Hyderabad (PHFI-IIPH) since 2009. She has a PhD (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and is a physician, with an MA in Safety Promotion and Injury Prevention (Karolinska Institute, Sweden) and an MA in Public Health (Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Kerala). Her interests encompass injury and disability prevention in adults and children. She has been the principal investigator (PI) and co-PI of numerous research projects, with national and international collaborators, and enjoys teaching, training, and mentoring in public health.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Toronto. She is a political scientist specialising in the politics of taxation and informal institutions and the political economy of informality and development.
Nicholas Watson is Chair of Disability Studies and Director of the Centre for Disability Research in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. His recent work includes research on disability hate crime, the experiences of disabled people in the criminal justice system, transition for young disabled people, and welfare reform. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Disability Research (2019) and is an active member of the disabled people’s movement.
Jane Wilbur (PhD) is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, focusing on disability, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Jane’s doctoral research aimed to investigate the barriers to menstrual hygiene management (MHM) that people with disabilities face, to develop an MHM behaviour change intervention for young people with intellectual disabilities in Nepal, and assess its feasibility. Jane has worked in East and Southern Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. She has extensive experience in research, designing, implementing, and evaluating inclusive WASH programmes, as well as disseminating research to influence policy and practice.
Samantha Willan is a gender-based violence (GBV) researcher and Capacity Development Specialist at the Gender and Health Research Unit at the South African Medical Research Council. Her research focuses on understanding the experiences of young women in contexts of heightened poverty, patriarchy, and violence, including the role of agency in informing and shifting women’s experiences, exploring rape survivors’ notions of shame, self-blame, and self-stigma, femininities, GBV, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and adolescents and young women, improving post-rape care as well as pathways to change. She has a PhD in Public Health from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Happiness Zidana is Learning, Compliance and Quality Assurance Officer at the non-profit organisation Centre for Community Organization and Development (CCODE) Malawi.