Naseem Shaikh
Associate Director of Programs – Swayam Shikshan Prayog
Osmanabad, Maharashtra – India
Born and raised in Solapur, Naseem started working with Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP) in 1996. She started her work as a program coordinator and has focused on implementing different approaches and initiatives to women’s economic empowerment in SSP. Naseem began addressing issues of health, hygiene, and sanitation after a massive earthquake in Maharashtra and Gujarat. She is interested in how women can take active roles in public and political spaces to ensure policy and program implementation.
In the last 20 years, Naseem has traveled across states in India and other countries to transfer women-led best practices and to raise women’s issues on national and international platforms. The last six years have seen major drought in Maharashtra, and farming is a high risk and difficult enterprise. Naseem sees that women have a hard time accessing agriculture schemes and trainings in agriculture. Women aren’t recognized as farmers in a state so they are not allowed to make any decisions (like what to plant) in farming even though they provide the manual labor on their farms. In the last four years, she organized women farmers in an agriculture group to shift climate resilience, create food secure agriculture, reduce the climate risk, and to improve the agriculture economy and food in the community working hard to access cultivation and land rights of women.
Rise Up Cohort: CIP India – 2018