Ayesha has over 30 years’ experience as a gender and development researcher. Her thematic areas of interest are feminist movements, women’s political participation and democratization, sexual and reproductive rights, and economic empowerment. Her expertise lies in research design and qualitative methodologies, literature reviews and policy analyses - being skilled at translating research findings into outputs for advocacy purpose and policy impact. She currently leads the GESI programme’s research on social movements, and backlash to feminism.

Ayesha has a PhD in Development Studies, and is author of The Women’s Movement in Pakistan: Activism, Islam and Democracy (2018). Her work is published in leading academic journals and she has served on the governing bodies of leading advocacy NGOs in Pakistan.

Before joining ODI, Ayesha worked in Karachi, Pakistan leading innovative field-based research and policy analysis at the Collective for Social Science Research for over 20 years. She partnered with multi-country research programmes led by the Institute of Development Studies, for which she contributed research in areas such as women’s political voice, the empowerment related effects of paid work, shrinking civic space, and donor programmes to support democratization. She also partnered with UCL in a ten-country study on the impact of COVID-19 on families using innovative online ethnographic research methodologies.

Ayesha has led work on research to measure the socio-economic impact of unsafe abortion-related morbidity and mortality funded by the Packard Foundation. She received MacArthur Foundation support to lead an oral history project on the impact of conflict on women.