Maliha Khan
President and Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Maliha Khan brings three decades of leadership and expertise in gender equality. Dr. Khan’s commitment to feminist movements and the empowerment of girls and women began in her native country of Pakistan, where she started her career implementing development projects in marginalized regions of the country. Her first few years of experience focused on incorporating the first cohort of girls and women into exclusively male development projects, which taught her a lot about what not to do. Her commitment to gender equality continued in her roles leading gender-focused program design, implementation, and evaluation at organizations like the Care and Oxfam. She has also worked with the Rockefeller Foundation, and Asian Development Bank, and was the head of programs at Malala Fund before joining Women Deliver. Based on her personal and professional experience in Pakistan and countries around the world, she firmly believes that organizations working to advance gender equality worldwide must be representative of the world’s most vulnerable girls and women to truly achieve change. Her experience in international development programming has also made her a fierce advocate for challenging and dismantling the sector’s colonial and racist legacies that continue to inform its operations, programming, language, and funding. She believes real change is possible with a concerted, intentional effort to challenge structures and systems — a belief that underpins her leadership at Women Deliver.
Prior to her international development work, Dr. Khan spent many years in academia teaching gender studies, including as an Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at World Learning’s SIT Graduate Institute and at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. She has a PhD from the State University of New York and an MA from Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad in Social Anthropology.
