Born in Lahore on September 17, 1957, Ms. Naghma Rashid holds Post graduate degrees in Public Administration and Educational Planning Management and has over 35 years of experience in the field of education and development. For more than 25 years she served DAMEN & Damen Support Programme as CEO & was involved in overall management and administration of the organization. Damen Support Programme which is a leading company working for the empowerment of poor, especially women living in fourteen districts of Punjab, through a network of a head office, three regional offices, nine area offices and more than fifty field offices.
More than 600 full time professionals had worked under her supervision to help bring a meaningful change in the lives of poor people of Pakistan especially women through provisioning of micro finance services, income generating activities for poor women, enhancing of entrepreneur skills among women, group formation and collective decision making at village level and linkage with other civil society organizations, constitute major areas of focus of Damen Support Programme. She was also involved in making the women of marginalized communities self-reliant not only economically but socially as well in a society where women subjugation is norm. Her responsibility included planning, decision-making and all major tasks of directing, managing and coordinating the activities undertaken by Damen Support Programme and necessary steps required for the efficient working of the institution.
Ms Naghma took retirement from Damen Support Programme in 2020 and now is on the Board of DSP, serving as chairperson besides working as the Policy and Risk Advisor to BOD (Gratis).
Shahzaib is an experienced management consultant, advising clients on complex institutional transformations and performance improvement programs. Currently, he is associated with EY Ford Rhodes.
He is Chartered Accountant from Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan (ICAP). In addition to this, he is Fellow member of Institute of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB) from International Six Sigma Institute. He is also a certified director from ICAP. He has more than 11 years of rich and diversified consultancy experience with two big4 firms.
Specialties:
He is also a visiting faculty member at one of the most renowned RAET in Pakistan and teaches strategy/ business management subjects. He is a public speaker and one the active speaker at Think Ahead with ACCA (professional insight forum).
Syeda Shehrbano Kazim is a development consultant with a focus on capacity building and communications. She has considerable experience in designing and structuring capacity building initiatives, conducting trainings, developing communications strategies and campaigns and managing events.
With a degree in Social Science and Economics from LUMS, she has worked in the corporate and development sector primarily in public relations and content development positions. She has participated in the Sangat residential course in Nepal on Gender, Sustainable Livelihoods, Human Rights and Peace and attended the Harvard Kennedy School executive education course on Financial Institutions for Public Enterprise Development.
She is the editor-in-chief of the Spectrum of International Law, a journal published thrice a year by the School of International Law (SIL) in Islamabad. She is also on the Board of Directors of SIL.
Recent trainings she has conducted have ranged from topics in gender, microfinance, various aspects of communications and cultural orientations. She has also organized trainings in corporate governance, risk management and investment readiness. Moreover, she has conducted a training needs assessment (TNA) of the microfinance sector for the Pakistan Microfinance Network and assessed a State Bank of Pakistan training programme. She is on the Trainers’ Roster at the National Institute of Banking and Finance and regularly conducts part of the Grass Root Level Trainings for them.
She has conducted cultural orientations for the International Catholic Migration Commission for people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds – from regions as diverse as Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – often working with simultaneous translators. She also designs and conducts customized soft skills training for clients.
Sadaf has nearly two decades of experience in the nonprofit education and skills training space in Pakistan, driving positive social change for youth. She has previously served as Pakistan Country Director for Generation Youth Employment, a McKinsey-founded skills training nonprofit, where she also served as technical advisor to the Punjab Skills Development Fund. Her previous experience also includes The Citizens Foundation the world’s largest chain of nonprofit schools, and Acumen Pakistan, an affiliate of Acumen, a US-based impact investment fund. She has consulted for LUMS a leading not-for-profit university, CIRCLE Women a grassroots digital & financial literacy nonprofit, and Pakistan Children’s Heart Foundation (PCHF). She has an undergraduate degree in computer science and math, and an MBA from LUMS where she received a gold medal for first place overall.
Ms. Manal Bakhtiari with MBA from Lahore School of Economics has over 14 years of experience in the financial and development sector in project management, governance, strategy and worked on Education. Prior to entering the development sector, she worked in the Banking sector as Unit Head Corporate & SME Banking at HSBC. She was part of the core 25 members’ team that started the HSBC bank from scratch in a new market. Most recently she worked as Operations Manager on a USAID project from 2018-2022 where she supervised operations, procurement and the financial division along with providing Technical Assistance on the Programmatic Activities. Ms. Manal has conducted a number of evaluation and consultancies for international organization.
Mr. Nadeem Iqbal has been serving as Professor of Finance at Air University Islamabad. He completed his PhD in Finance from Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad in February 2015. During PhD he visited the UK and completed his research thesis in Durham University UK on the topic of Financing the Poverty Reduction Program in Rural Pakistan. He did his Postdoc from Lancaster University, UK in 2017 on “Measuring the Effectiveness of Microfinance lending schemes in Reducing Poverty in Pakistan”.
Dr. Nadeem Iqbal is an HEC Approved research supervisor. He has published in highly reputed international and national journals and reviewed papers of international journals and chaired international conferences as an expert in Finance. In addition to microfinance, his research interests include Corporate Governance, CSR, Microfinance, banking, green finance and environment. His more than 100 research papers are published in SCI, SSCI, ESCI, Scopus and HEC recognized journals. He wrote the chapters of the book.. He is also chief editor of Journal of Business & Economics. He also supervised MS and PhD scholars.
Before joining Air University, Islamabad, Dr. Nadeem Iqbal also performed management roles in different organizations as well. He has experience of more than 20 years. He performed duties of Treasurer, Head of department and Incharge campus at Ghazi University DG Khan. He is also a member of a think tank and research institute in the country.
Mr. Arbab has been working in the development and commercial banking sectors for the past 30 years, with a focus on financial inclusion, SME, Agriculture and digital finance. Until recently he served as Senior Advisor, South Asia with CGAP/World Bank, where his main focus was the creation of a $200 million SPV to support SMEs in Pakistan. Prior to this, he served as Regional Director at Enclude, a global consulting and advisory firm. Before joining Enclude, Mr. Arbab was CEO of the Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA), a World Bank sponsored Apex institution. He was also a founding member of the management team of the Bank of Khyber in Pakistan’s Khyber-Paktunkhwa Province. In addition, he has served in senior positions with the Aga Khan Rural Support Program and the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan.
