Fellows

Agha Mohsin Ali has been working in the development sector since 2006 with National & International organizations including NRDP, WWOP, Youth in Action, UNDP, BBSA, CPEA Network and SEHER on different management positions. He earned a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Balochistan, Quetta Pakistan. While working with the National Rural Development Programme (NRDP) Pakistan in Islamabad as Manager, Program Planning and Partnership Development, he led overall fundraising, resource mobilization, program research, planning, and program development processes. During 10 years of experience he implemented, coordinated, and developed partnerships with major donor agencies like USAID, DFID, UK-aid, UNICEF, USAID, CIDA, UNICEF, UNDP, USIP and IOM. Agha has had in-depth experience in child rights, education, and youth empowerment in Pakistan. He worked to protect children from abuse, neglect, and exploitation as well as to provide access to education through establishment of child-friendly spaces and temporary learning centers in flood affected areas. He has provided child protection actors opportunity to interact, share their experiences and avoid any duplication of resources through the CPEA Network and 12 larger projects on education, child rights, democracy and nutrition. Over this period, he has developed skills in monitoring and evaluation, program development, program implementation, proposal writing and resource mobilization. He has also written different articles and blogs on child rights and education in different news sites like ARY Blogs, Hamari Web, Duniya News and The Nations News. Agha also participated in different national and international forums like the World Youth Conference, 2010 in Leon City, Mexico, where he was as a delegate.

Host Organization: Creative Associates International

 Role at Host Organization: Agha will be assisting project staff with the development of an indicator database for a new evaluation project with the ExxonMobil Foundation. This project will be assessing the progress of client grantees in women’s economic empowerment on outcome indicators.

Asma Razaq has been working in both print and electronic media for the last six years. At present, she is working as a Reporter in Samaa Tv, Pakistan’s top news channel. At Samaa, her primary responsibilities include: the coverage of economic affairs including the Federal Board of Revenue, the Ministry of Finance, financial institutions, foreign investment and assistance to Pakistan, the Privatization Commission, and health issues. Earlier, she worked for Abbtak news channel for two years. She was also working in an English Daily ‘Business Recorder;’ the biggest financial daily in Pakistan, and the first such publication in the Muslim world. She worked for Daily Business Recorder for five years. One of Asma’s articles was included among the top stories of a New York-based website ‘www.tobacco.org;’ her stories exposed a pharmaceutical company that was selling an anti-hepatitis injection without conducting human tests. Asma’s news articles on health issues put pressure on the government to form a Drug Regulatory Authority (DRA) in Pakistan. Recently, her news package titled ‘IMF and Pakistan’ was widely appreciated and got national recognition, as well. Asma has worked with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a Coordinator. She had been nominated by the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan for the reporting tour on Global Food Security in the year 2011. She had also been selected as a participant of US-Pak Journalist Exchange Program-2014 by the East-West Center in Hawaii. During the program, she was selected as a guest in ‘Global Journalist,’ a popular radio program in Columbia.

Host Organization: Universities Allied for Essential Medicine

Role at Host Organization: “As the Media and Communications Fellow, Asma Razaq will support the creative development and implementation of a media and communications strategy for UAEM North America. This involves implementing the interactive new website design so it is usable to share media and foster communication work in building a more effective and efficient internal communication strategy.

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Maryem has 5 years of experience in the development sector and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Bahria University in Islamabad, Pakistan. Maryem’s association with the development sector has been diverse both in terms of thematic and functional areas. While working as a program officer in USAID’s Small Grants and Ambassador Fund Program, she provided assistance to the grassroots level organization in designing initiatives in education, health, economic development, entrepreneurship, disaster, women’s issues, culture, and the environment. As the regional manager at a consultancy firm, she helped with research and monitoring and evaluation. She also carried out institutional assessments and conducted capacity building exercises for DFID, EU, World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF and USAID funded projects. Through these experiences, she developed strong project coordination and implementation skills. Maryem enjoys focusing on the topics of economic empowerment and social entrepreneurship and has a strong passion for women’s empowerment.

Host Organization: Global Communities

Role at Host Organization: Maryem will provide support to Global Communities’ economic development portfolio with a particular focus on entrepreneurship, enterprise development including cooperative development, access to finance, workforce development and private sector partnerships. She will develop specific technical products and tools, including programming frameworks/models for business advisory services and workforce development; cooperative enterprise development tools; and research briefs.

Mehak has three years of experience in the nonprofit sector, and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance and Environmental Policy from the Lahore School of Economics. While working as an Assistant Manager for Communications and Knowledge Management at Nur Center for Research and Policy, Mehak spearheaded a DFID-UKAID funded project for developing the first National Knowledge Portal for Maternal and Neonatal Child Health (MNCH). This knowledge portal serves as a platform to share and collate maximum available MNCH knowledge in Pakistan, to facilitate public health experts and establish policymakers in developing evidence-based policies to strengthen the MNCH sector in Pakistan. Mehak also worked as Project Lead for an operational study with UNICEF on the Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) initiative, where she was intricately involved in organizing training sessions for skilled birth attendants and designing interventions based on the findings of the research. In the past she has worked for different social and development projects, supporting youth and women’s rights, which she feels passionately about. Previously, Mehak has worked on a one year USAID funded project on rehabilitating survivors of gender based violence (GBV) at a shelter-home. Her work involved developing holistic rehabilitation plans for the GBV survivors in order to reintegrate them back into society. Through these experiences, she has developed strong project management, report writing, event planning and communication skills, especially with regards to donor-funded projects. She is also a certified fitness instructor and works part-time at a fitness studio, leading High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workouts.

Host Organization: Atlas Corps

 Role at Host Organization: Mehak will be responsible for managing the Atlas Corps Global Leadership Lab (GLL), a training program for rising global nonprofit leaders participating in the Atlas Corps Fellowship. She will also plan and manage this leadership development program to empower Atlas Corps Fellows in their professional journeys. Mehak will ensure the overall excellent experience for staff, speakers, and Fellow participants.

Nafeesa has six years of experience in the nonprofit sector in education, poverty alleviation, and humanitarian relief in emergencies. During these years her exposure to many parts of the country and abroad through extensive field visits provided her with the chance to see the ground realities and interact with people at the grassroots level, at the same time enabling her to deal with government officials, civil society including people from pluralistic backgrounds. Nafeesa earned a postgraduate degree in Human Rights from Curtin University of Technology, Australia, where she was a scholarship holder under the Australian Development Scholarship. Nafeesa is also trained in Program and Project Management and Administration (PPMA) by Management Development Foundation (MDF) in The Netherlands. She earned a fellowship with the Nuffic Fellowship Programme for this course. Nafeesa has worked with CARE International in Pakistan in the Floods Emergency Response Programme (FERP) where she was engaged in supporting Implementing Partners (IPs) in understanding donor compliance, accountability and quality in humanitarian relief projects. Nafeesa has also worked for the Pakistan Coalition for Education (PCE) as Research and Advocacy Coordinator where she was responsible for supporting coalition work through conceptualizing, developing, executing and reviewing advocacy campaigns. These campaigns were aimed at policy-makers and emphasized over the need for a rights-based approach to education in national policies.

Host Organization: National Democratic Institute

Sadia Ijaz completed her Master’s in International Relations, from University of Peshawar, an LL.B degree from Ayub College of Law, Haripur, and Bachelor’s of Education (B.Ed.) from Hazara University Mansehra (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in Pakistan. SadiaIjaz brings more than ten years of rich professional experience mainly in child rights, education, health and hygiene, communications, monitoring, reporting, documentation, and professional practice leadership roles. She has held progressive management roles at Saibaan Development Organization and De LaasGul (DLG) Welfare Program in child rights, child labor, women empowerment, library development, and water filtration plant projects funded by OXFAM Germany, ILO, Asia Foundation, Association for Development of Pakistan, and Global Funds for Children. She has seen great success in the development and implementation of these projects, and also has shown great leadership and initiatives that shows her persona. Sadia worked in Early Childhood Care Education (ECCE) project with Save the Children International funded by Netherlands Embassy for a year. She is presently the Senior Officer of Documentation, Reporting and Communications at Save the Children International. She has experience in improving coordination with external stakeholders and has overcome many challenges, which ultimately improved the impact of the projects implemented by Save the Children in the region. Sadia is an effective and dynamic leader with sound knowledge of issues related to teacher education, school development, leadership, and ECCE in the context of Pakistan. Through these experiences, she developed strong project coordination management, communications, monitoring, evaluation, reporting, documentation, and program implementation skills.

Host Organization: RESULTS

Role at Host Organization: Sadia will ensure effective coordination of the International/Northern Civil Society Organizations constituency, through the establishment of an online communications platform, development of a constituency advocacy strategy, and contributions to ongoing research and analysis of key constituency issues. She will also regularly communicate across the other Global Partnership for Education Board civil society constituencies to ensure coordinated actions.

Sadia is a development practitioner with demonstrated skills in social and academic research. She has over five years of experience in the non-profit sector where she worked with micro-finance institute, nonprofit organisations and consultancy firms. Based on her extensive role as a team leader and social influencer, she became a Chevening Alumna (2016-17) and attained master’s degree in Social Research Methods (Social Policy) from Durham University, United Kingdom. Her degree has equipped her with an in-depth understanding of\nSocial Research which covered range of approaches to research- not only in terms of the techniques and methods used in social research, but also in terms of the theoretical underpinning of research. Throughout her career, Sadia has passionately worked for socio-economic development of her country where she addressed the issues pertaining to social policy areas such as gender inequality, poverty, education, healthcare, and unequal economic opportunities. In her efforts to address these issues she worked extensively at various positions to empower women through education and entrepreneurship in Pakistan so as to eradicate poverty and inequalities from the society. Through these\nexperiences, Sadia has developed strong social research, project management (including, project planning and implementation) policy development, and policy related evaluation research skills which helped her to investigate and highlight social issues and device programme implementation and action plans to address them.

Host Organization: Kiva

Role at Kiva: At Kiva, Sadia will help us significantly improve the breadth and depth of our research reviews, which form the basis of Kiva’s impact measurement system. This will involve not only expanding the set of studies we use, but significantly improving the way we communicate their results and our methodology.

Saqib Riaz is a public outreach and advocacy professional with 11 years of experience in public sector, nonprofit and media organizations. He has strong understanding of international development, human rights issues and global politics. Currently, he is working as Senior Public Diplomacy and Political Affairs Officer at the Embassy of the Netherlands in Islamabad where he is extensively involved in political reporting for The Hague, and protection and promotion of human rights by engaging with NGOs, INGOs and UN agencies based in Pakistan. Saqib has demonstrated impactful contributions to improve the quality of elections as well as democracy in Pakistan. He managed the advocacy portfolio of Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), Pakistan’s largest election observation network, by contributing to mainstreaming the long-impending agenda of electoral and political reforms – a prerequisite for the deepening of democracy in the country. His academic grounding as a political scientist with a Master’s Degree from the University of Punjab, Lahore, has provided him the added advantage of steering complex advocacy campaigns to influence policy, legal and regulatory reforms. Harnessing the potential of new technologies, Saqib successfully blended traditional communication tools with more advanced and emerging social media to advance FAFEN’s electoral reforms work. Saqib started his career as a journalist and has worked with print and electronic media as desk editor and producer. He was the member of the founding team of Express 24/7, Pakistan’s first English-language news channel. His hobbies include traveling, trekking and photography.

Host Organization : Meridian International Center

Role at Host Organization : Saqib conducted need assessment for revamping communication channels of Meridian and expanded online outreach through social media and website. He generated content, articles, case studies/blogs and managed website and social media accounts during his one-year fellowship. Saqib also served as a resource person to develop concept notes for programs specific to Pakistan and coordinated with Meridian teams, partners, public/private donors to ensure visibility of Meridian’s programs. He introduced the use of infographics, photos and compelling videos for marketing of Meridian, and developed a strategy and curriculum to improve communication and build capacity of Meridian staff on effective communications.