Dr. Maliha Khan was a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. She is also chief programmes officer at Malala Fund where she leads the strategic direction and effective delivery of Malala Fund’s programmatic work to increase financing for girls’ education and to remove social norm and policy barriers that prevent girls from getting 12 years of quality education. Dr. Khan is an international expert in program design and performance, learning, and accountability, with a focus on women and girls’ empowerment. She has designed rights-based programs focused on women and girls, been a professor of gender studies, and has implemented women’s programs in marginalized regions of Pakistan. Dr. Khan has worked extensively on frameworks for difficult-to-measure concepts such as gender empowerment, attitude and perception change, and resilience. She has led program quality, impact measurement, and knowledge management functions at CARE USA and Oxfam America.

Dr. Khan has extensive experience in designing and implementing complex multi-country systems for large organizations and complex programs, and innovating the use of ICT, new forms of data collection and real time monitoring in M&E systems. While at Oxfam she oversaw the organization’s ICT for Development initiative and the Oxfam confederation wide “Responsible Data Policy”, the first policies of its kind in any development organization.

Most recently, Dr. Khan has founded and led a start-up consulting firm that specializes in supporting clients in better decision-making through innovative information and measurement systems. She has also been a long-term consultant for Rockefeller Foundation and Girl Effect (Nike Foundation initiative). Prior to her international development work, Dr. Khan has spent many years in academia, as an Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at World Learning’s SIT Graduate Institute and at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

Dr. Khan is from Pakistan, where she started her career implementing development projects. She has a PhD from the State University of New York and a MA from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad in Social Anthropology.