User:Pratyabhijna

GITA SEN

Gita Sen has 32 years of experience working nationally and internationally for gender equality and women’s human rights as a policy advocate, an analyst, a program implementer, and a negotiator, with an in-depth knowledge spanning globalisation, poverty, human development, labour markets, and women’s health. Born in 1948, and a citizen of India, Gita holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. She is a professor of public policy at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India, and adjunct professor of population and international health at Harvard University.

Building partnerships and engaging with key constituencies

Her national and international work has helped to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment and human rights through a variety of positions and with a number of partners – governments, multilateral and bilateral organizations, and civil society. In many of these roles she has had a formal or informal leadership position where she has been successful in building and strengthening commitments to gender equality. Major recognition for her work came through her being awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 1994 for her work on women and development.

Her knowledge of and experience with intergovernmental processes and UN agencies has depth and range. She has participated, as an official government delegate and as a non-governmental representative in the series of UN conferences in the 1990s including the Beijing and Cairo conferences and their five- and ten-year reviews, and has proven ability to build partnerships across governments, UN agencies and women’s organizations.

The UN system has sought out her skills and expertise in a number of ways. She has supported UNDP’s HDR Office and its human development work, has been on UNDP’s CSO Advisory Committee, and on the Millennium Project Taskforce on Gender Equality. She was the first Chairperson of the World Bank’s External Gender Consultative Group, set up after the Beijing conference. She has worked closely with UNFPA during intergovernmental processes and as an advisor to policies and programs, internationally and nationally in India. As someone who is known to be able to integrate gender equality effectively in a number of substantive policy areas, she was invited to join the Advisory Committee on Health Research to advise WHO’s Director General. She has served on the Governing Board of UNRISD, and has been nominated to the Governing Council of the UN University. Since November 2006 she has been Special Advisor to UNIFEM’s Executive Director for Economic Security and Rights.

Outside the UN system, she has been a policy advisor to Sida, and a member of the high-level international Expert Group on Development Issues set up by Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her experience has also been drawn upon by the Commonwealth Secretariat and DFiD among other agencies. Within India, recognition of her experience and skills has come through membership in a number of committees and advisory groups over the years, including the Advisory Group of Experts to the Health Minister, and policy and technical resource groups for UNFPA, the Planning Commission, and the National Aids Control Organization. She has served on the official delegation of the Government of India at key UN negotiations.

She is a founder member of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), a network of policy-makers, scholars and activists from the economic South, and their coordinator on the Political Economy of Globalization. With strong links to many organizations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and Asia, her skill in organizing women’s groups has been drawn upon in many meetings in different regions. Non-governmental experience includes service on the Governing Boards of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. She has been vice-president of the Society for International Development and of the International Women’s Health Coalition, and has served on advisory committees for major foundations such as the MacArthur and Packard Foundations and the Open Society Institute.

Her role as a policy leader has received recognition through the awarding of an honorary doctorate by the University of East Anglia in 1998, and another by the Karolinska Institutet in 2003.

Program Direction and Management experience

She has had responsibility for initiating, setting up and managing key programs and organizations. As the first Coordinator for UNFPA’s International Training Program on Population and Development in India, she had a pioneering role. At the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB), one of India’s premier educational institutions, she has been instrumental in setting up and managing the new Centre for Public Policy (CPP) with major funding from UNDP and the Government of India. This involved intensive negotiations with multiple partners, fund-raising, setting strategic directions, and managing and developing the CPP as a major think-tank. She has also had to set up management systems for funds and monitoring to meet international and UNDP standards. The CPP under her leadership as its second Chairperson has become within a short space of time a major venue for dialogue, capacity building and analysis.

She has also had experience with program administration as the Director of the MacArthur Program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University; and as the Chairperson of the PhD program at IIMB.

Advocacy

She has extensive experience as an advocate for gender equality in many different forums. She is recognized and in demand as a speaker for women’s rights, who is able to bring scholarship and effective communication together seamlessly. A number of years of experience with the ground level realities of the lives, livelihoods and health of poor women through, among other things, her work in planning and managing a major public health intervention in a poor district in India, allow her to bring these realities to the policy and advocacy arena with a mix of realism and conviction. The ability to communicate effectively to diverse audiences can be seen in the range of invitations she regularly receives from major global (including UN) bodies, governments, donors and private foundations, academic institutions, and civil society organizations and forums. She is effective at persuading through logic, and together with her other skills, this has built support for fresh ideas, broken new ground in the link between analysis and policy, and mobilized official support for needed approaches and effective implementation.

Analysis

Her book, Development, Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, written as a contribution to the UN women’s conference in Nairobi in 1984 helped transform thinking on gender and development. Her co-edited book Population Policies Reconsidered: Health, Empowerment and Rights has been influential in reshaping the population field. She also co-edited Gender, Economic Growth and Poverty: Market Growth and State Planning in Asia and the Pacific. She has published extensively, and recent work includes research and policy advocacy on the political economy of globalization and economic liberalization, the gender dimensions of population policies, and gender equity in health. This analytical and empirical work contributes depth and substance to her policy advocacy and program support by putting research in the service of policies and programs. Her monograph for the Commonwealth Secretariat on Gender Mainstreaming in Finance has become a useful reference manual for training and capacity building. The MIT Press book on Engendering International Health: the Challenge of Equity led to the creation of the Gender and Health Equity Network, which works to strengthen policies and programs for gender equity in health in specific locations in India, China and Mozambique. This has been followed by the setting up for WHO’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health of a global knowledge network on women’s health and gender equity, which has brought together policy makers, practitioners, and researchers in highly fruitful exchanges.

Major awards and honors

The combination of advocacy, practical experience, activism and analysis has resulted in a number of major awards and honors, including the Volvo Environment Prize and honorary doctorates from the University of East Anglia and the Karolinska Institute.