Ms. Shweta Bankar is Deputy Director – Gender of Uttar Pradesh Technical Support Unit (UP-TSU). She provides strategic leadership on designing, planning and integrating gender equality across the programmes of UPTSU. She plays the key role in establishing mechanisms to integrate gender equality in the processes, programmes and policies with the support of empirical evidence. Shweta brings in the scope for gender analysis to advocate for systemic change to mainstream gender in public policy by sensitizing government officials around gender related issues. Gender integrating/mainstreaming converges with the developmental goals of the country and can accelerate the progress towards quality and respectful health care and sustainability.
A development sector professional with an experience of more than 14 years in planning, designing, managing, and monitoring of large programmes and action research, Shweta has been instrumental in rolling out large scale programmes centering gender norms and gender analysis integrated with qualitative research mainly Participatory Learning and Action to voice the unheard and build accountability. She had contributed significantly to the areas of men engagement in gender norms shifting interventions, sexual and reproductive health of adolescents, impact of community-based intervention on shifting norms around early, child and forced marriage, and empowerment efforts in reducing vulnerabilities among the marginalized population, across various states in India.
Before joining IHAT, Shweta has served as a Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Social and Behaviour Change, Ashoka University. She has also worked on gender norms around adolescent girls and health service uptake at Dasra, Mumbai. Her work with the International Centre for Research on Women as the Senior Technical Specialist focused on gender norm shifting interventions in the marginalized communities across various states in India
Shweta has more than 20 peer reviewed publications in international journals, books, reports to her credit. She has also participated and presented her research work in a number of international and national conferences and scientific workshops. She is the founder member of the South Asia – Social Norms and Agency Learning Collaborative and the Adolescent Community of Practice in Jharkhand. Shweta earned her Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women’s University, Pune Campus.
Outside work Shweta likes to travel to learn different cuisines and experiment them in her kitchen.
