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Nigar
Ahmad gets Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah Life Time Achievement Award
2010
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Ms. Nigar Ahmad, Founder Executive
Director of Aurat Foundation has been awarded Mohtarma
Fatima Jinnah Life Time Achievement Award, 2010, for her
services in the field of political, social, legal and
economic empowerment of women in Pakistan. Dr. Masuma
Hasan, founding Member of Aurat Foundation’s Board of
Governors and former cabinet secretary, received the
award from the Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani
in Islamabad, on behalf of Ms. Nigar Ahmad, on 6 August
2010. |
Ms. Nigar Ahmad has worked tirelessly
for nearly 25 years for the empowerment of Pakistani women, as
Executive Director of the Aurat Publication and Information
Service Foundation. Under her stewardship, the Aurat (woman)
Foundation has taken up a range of causes, from mobilizing women
candidates for national and local government elections to
generating debate across the country about women’s political and
economic empowerment and issues relating to peace and democracy.
An academic and a
social activist, she was a brilliant student who came top of her
Masters of Economics year in Punjab University and went on to
study economics at Cambridge University. She was also a
Commonwealth Scholar. While pursuing a career in academia she
taught economics for 16 years at the faculty of the Quaid-e-Azam
University in Islamabad and was drawn into the struggle of
Pakistani women against the anti-women policies of the military
dictatorship headed by Zia-ul-Haq.
She was a member of
the Women’s Action Forum for two years (1983–1985) before
founding Aurat Foundation together with Shahla Zia. Nigar has
researched the work of women in the informal sector, and
organized national conferences for peasant women, as well as
radio programmes to educate them on health and agricultural
issues. She campaigned for the need to generate correct
information on women’s work during the fifth National Census in
1998.
Nigar has
contributed to shaping policy debates on women’s empowerment
through her close involvement with bodies such as the National
Commission on the Status of Women. She was a co-author of the
report on Women’s Development Programmes for Pakistan’s Eighth
Five Year Plan, and played a similar role with respect to the
Sixth Five Year Plan.
She was one of the
1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. She is a
nominee from Pakistan of the Global Sisterhood Network. As
researcher, Nigar has extensively investigated the situation of
grassroots women in Pakistan. She has also researched
tenant-landlord struggles in Pakistan and co-authored a study on
the life of rural women in Punjab.
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