Srilatha Batliwala
Srilatha Batliwala is Scholar Associate with the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and a freelance consultant and researcher. Her current work focuses on concepts and practices of feminist movement building, leadership, and monitoring and evaluation, and on capacity building and mentoring for young feminist leaders. Srilatha began her working life in 1975 and has over the decades bridged grassroots activism, advocacy, teaching, research, training, grant-making and scholarly work, all with a strong commitment to gender equality and social justice. Since the mid-90s, she has worked primarily internationally, including as a Programme Officer in the Ford Foundation (New York), a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organisations (Harvard University, till end 2009), and since 2007, with AWID. She is well known for her leadership of large-scale grassroots empowerment movements (such as SPARC and Mahila Samakhya) that mobilised and empowered thousands of the poorest women in both urban and rural areas in India. Srilatha has published extensively on a range of women’s issues, including the widely translated and used Women’s empowerment in South Asia – Concepts and practices, and more recently, the AWID documents, Changing their world – Concepts and practices of women’s movements and Capturing change in women’s realities.
Parminder Jeet Singh
Parmi
nder Jeet Singh worked for nearly a decade in the government, where he initiated innovative e-governance projects. During this time, in 2001, he co-authored the book, Government@Net: E-governance opportunities for India (Sage Publications). He has worked with many ICTD field projects, as well as in policy research and advocacy related to information society issues. At IT for Change, Parminder is the coordinator of a UNDP-funded field project, which aims to bring new ICTs to disadvantaged rural women, and is co-coordinator of IT for Change’s research and advocacy project ‘Information Society for the South’. Parminder is a member of the Strategy Council of the UN’s Global Alliance on ICTs and Development, and a Special Advisor to the Chair of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum.