Naseem Shaikh

Naseem Shaikh is the Chief Executive Officer of Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP) and an expert with over two decades of experience in organising rural grassroots women to strengthen their economic, social, and political resilience, helping them move from the margins to the mainstream. With a lifelong commitment to advancing women’s leadership, she has worked extensively on empowerment in contexts of disaster recovery, climate change, and sustainable development. Naseem has brought critical insights into building women’s leadership in areas such as health, nutrition, water security, sanitation, and climate resilience, and has contributed to setting global indicators for women’s capacity building with the Huairou Commission.

After the 1993 Latur earthquake, she took on the major challenge of mobilising over 500 rural women across as many villages to act as intermediaries between government agencies and affected communities. Following the recovery phase, she continued to redefine women’s roles as planners and leaders through a large UNDP-supported project. In 2005, she pioneered an innovative Community Health Mutual Fund model that enabled women’s federations to own and manage community-based health insurance funds.

As a recognised global leader within the Huairou Commission — a worldwide network of grassroots women’s organisations co-founded by SSP — Naseem has played a key role in sustaining women-led local action and advocacy. Under her leadership, SSP has grown into a vibrant network of over 350,000 rural women across India and has expanded its work to five Asian countries. Her approach focuses on enhancing women’s access to land, agriculture, water, sanitation, health, and climate adaptation resources to build resilience from the ground up.

Naseem’s contributions to climate change and agriculture have been featured in several local, national, and global forums, including dialogues on land ownership, locally led adaptation, and food systems. She has been instrumental in the Women’s Initiative in Learning and Leadership (WILL), which fosters women’s entrepreneurship, social empowerment, and climate adaptation leadership. She also leads SSP’s women’s agricultural value chain initiatives, supporting women farmers and entrepreneurs to strengthen their presence in local and national markets.

Her expertise spans project planning, social and business strategy, process design, and operations management. Naseem has participated as a panellist at major international forums, including the Second World Reconstruction Conference organised by GFDRR, the World Bank Group, the European Union, and UNDP. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from Shivaji University, Kolhapur, Maharashtra.