Naila Kabeer

A few years ago, I became interested in the claims in the economic literature that gender equality promotes economic growth.

There’s a buzz abroad in the development community around a new way to tackle extreme poverty. For exemple BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP) programme combines asset transfers (usually livestock), cash stipends, and intensive mentoring to women and families in extreme poverty in order to help them “graduate” into more sustainable livelihoods within two years.

Simeen Mahmud was an accomplished researcher working on issues of women's empowerment, women's work and labour force participation, and gender norms in Bangladesh. A statistician and demographer by training, Simeen was educated at the University of Dhaka and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was also a MacArthur Fellow at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies.