About Us: Our Team

Nisha Dhawan

Vice President, Impact and Influence

Languages Spoken: English, Hindi, Dutch

Nisha is the Vice President – Impact and Influence. She is passionate about amplifying the voices of girls, financial inclusion, and gender equity. Her role focusses on driving EMpower’s ambitions to better capture and communicate learnings, expertise and lessons learned by EMpower, grantee partners and youth protagonists, in the 15 countries where EMpower works; in order to influence broader change in programming and philanthropy. In her role, she works to build collaborations to influence the sector through building evidence, co-learning and sharing.

In her time at EMpower, which began in 2012 – she has been the Country Director of EMpower, the Director of the Adolescent Girls and Gender Initiatives where she worked collaboratively with the global programme team in centering the voice, choice and wisdom of girls and the Senior Program Officer for India and Regional Advisor, Asia with responsibility for developing and managing grantee partnerships and collaboratively conceiving and operationalizing programmatic initiatives such as the Adolescent Girls Learning Community and the Girls Advisory Council.

Nisha began her career working at Deutsche Bank and Barclays in London where she managed relationships with regulators and exchanges. Nisha is a TedX speaker – where she shared her passion about enabling girls’ voices to be heard.

She holds a PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi in Sociology. Her Doctoral research focused on the role that Non-Traditional Livelihoods plays in advancing the project of gender equity. She holds an MSc. in Gender, Development and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA (Hons.) from McGill University in Montreal, in International Politics and Women’s Studies.

Nisha has always been a fierce champion for girls and finds her deepest satisfaction and joy from interactions about their dreams for the future. She loves quoting her favorite feminists and never fails to find an opportune moment to do so.

More Team