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Mahfuza Mala
Academic Research Partner, Beyond Barriers: Overcoming Funding and Workforce Obstacles to Achieve a Localized Humanitarian Response Project
Mahfuza Mala is a dedicated feminist, women’s rights advocate and seasoned humanitarian professional committed to combating poverty and injustice with both her brain and heart. With over fifteen years of diverse experience across various countries and sectors, she specializes in long-term development and humanitarian action.
Mahfuza excels in supporting local actors to build coalitions that can effectively co-design and implement locally owned, holistic, evidence-based programs on a large scale. She addresses systemic and cross-sectoral challenges by enabling meaningful participation in larger-scale systems change. Her work focuses on facilitating direct access to significant bilateral and philanthropic funding, which is often routed exclusively through UN or international NGO channels. By supporting local actors, she helps them realize their collective power and drive the changes they envision for themselves, fostering inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, and community empowerment.
Throughout her career, Mahfuza has demonstrated exceptional leadership and managerial skills, driving large-scale change, strategic planning, and fostering organizational effectiveness and program quality. She is deeply committed to challenging patriarchal culture and dismantling discrimination, exclusion, inequality, and disempowerment. Her passion for gender justice, women's rights, and the empowerment of marginalized women is evident in her active co-leadership in nationwide gender awareness and rights protection activities for the past twelve years with Naripokkho, a women's activist organization in Bangladesh. In December 2023, she earned the position of Executive Committee Member at the Naripokkho.
In 2020, Mahfuza united young gender activists and climate advocates in Bangladesh through the "Ecofeminist Platform of Bangladesh." This platform aims to foster collaborative climate action for gender justice, showcasing her commitment to intersectional activism.
Mahfuza holds a master’s degree in Anthropology and possesses excellent interpersonal and communication skills, enabling her to excel in fostering effective working relationships in truly multicultural environments.
