Ms. Naseem Shaikh in her role as Associate Director of Programs at Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP) is an expert with over two decades of experience in organizing rural grassroots women to build their economic, social and political resilience to move from the margin to the mainstream. Naseem has a life time commitment in building women’s leadership and empowering women in varied contexts of disasters, climate change and sustainable goals. Naseem brings lot of insights in building women’s leadership especially in health, nutrition, water security, sanitation and climate resilience She has contributed her skills in analyzing women’s capacities and setting indicators at global level for Huairou Commission. After the massive Latur earthquake in 1993, Naseem took up an enormous challenge bringing out 500 + rural women in as many villages to act as catalyst between the Government and affected communities. After completion of the recovery initiatives, she continued and redesigned grassroots women’s roles as leaders and planners in a large UNDP supported project. In 2005, Naseem decided to explore an innovative model Community Health Mutual fund that allowed women’s Federations to own and manage people’s funds for health insurance. These insights from practice are centered on her long years of sustaining and scaling up a movement of self help groups that includes over 3,50,000 grassroots women in rural India and build their capacities to reduce vulnerabilities through access and control over land and agriculture, water and sanitation and health services, climate change and build a pillar for resilience.Naseem’s recent contribution and insights in climate change and Agriculture brought a wider audience in various local, national and global forums. She contributed in Land ownership, Locally Led Adaptation, Food systems dialogues at global level to strengthen the knowledge base drawn from the grassroots experience. She took a major role in in Women’s Initiatives in Learning and Lead (WILL) an effort to develop women leadership across entrepreneurship and empowerment in economic, social and climate adaptation.Her expertise also includes project planning, social and business strategy, process design and operations management. She participated as a panelist at the second World Reconstruction Conference organized by the GFDRR and the World Bank Group, in partnership with the European Union and UNDP in September 2014. Naseem earned her Masters in Social Work from Shivaji University, Kolhapur, Maharashtra.