About Ayesha
Ayesha Imam recognises that systems of oppression, exclusion and marginalisation – such as around gender and sexuality, class, environmental destruction, race and ethnicity – are inter-linked and need to be challenged and changed together.
Ayesha has: worked with IDEP (UN African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, Senegal) to strengthen gender analysis in economic development planning; the director BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights in Nigeria which won awards for defence of women’s rights in Muslim Laws; Head of the Culture, Gender and Human Rights Department of UNFPA; Board Chair of Greenpeace International, active with the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa, the international solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, the International Council for Human Rights Policy, Africa Action and the African Centre for Democratic Governance; as well as coordinated several global research or capacity-building programmes. She has worked with and for a range of organisations including women’s rights, official aid and UN agencies. She has lectured and carried out research at universities and research institutes in Nigeria, the U.K., Canada and Senegal.
Her work is published widely for activist, policy, and academic uses, and includes books, journal articles, policy briefs and activist manuals. Publications include The Devil is in the Details: At the Nexus of Development Women’s Rights and Religious Fundamentalisms (AWID 2016), Women In Search of Citizenship: Experiences from West Africa (2013), Engendering African Social Sciences (1999 reprint, and in French 2004), plus journal articles, policy briefs, and activist manuals. Capacity-building and strategy-sharing includes collaborating in Strategies of Resistance: Challenging the Cultural Disempowerment of Women (2011).
