Speaker

Independent Gender Advisor
Former CEO, Jagori

Suneeta Dhar is Co-Founder and Chair of the South Asia Women Foundation – India.  She has over four decades of experience in policy advocacy and programming in advancing women’s rights. She has worked with civil society and international organizations, including for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), at the Delhi and New York Offices, where she managed the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women.

She has been the former Director of Jagori. Currently, she works as an Independent Gender Advisor and Trainer with select groups. She has designed multi-stakeholder programmes, for engendering rural women’s livelihoods, ending violence against women, and building safer spaces for women/girls. As a policy advocate, she has been on Expert Committees of the National Commission for Women, and the Supreme Court’s Committee on Widow’s Rehabilitation.

She is a member of the Civil Society Advisory Group of UN Women (India), as well as co-represents the ‘Coalition on Inclusive and Safe Spaces for Women/Girls’, on the UN Women Generation Equality Action Coalition on Gender-Based Violence. She is a core group member of the SANGAT Feminist Network and co-founder of the Feminist Policy Collective, India. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and has been a recipient of the Fulbright and Advocacy Institute Fellowships for Development Practitioners. She has written on women’s safety, gender and SDGs, and women’s rights. Suneeta was recognized by Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy in 2021.