Tulika Srivastava, IWRAW Asia Pacific’s new executive director
IWRAW Asia Pacific extends our warmest welcome to our incoming executive director, Tulika Srivastava, who will be assuming this position effective 26 June 2024.
Tulika has been part of IWRAW Asia Pacific’s work since 1994 when, as a young lawyer, she was inspired by Shanthi Dairiam’s training on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and its grounding principles of equality and non-discrimination. Since then, she has carried these founding principles into all the work she has undertaken.
She founded the Association for Advocacy and Legal Initiatives (AALI), a women’s human rights organisation based in Lucknow, India, as a direct outcome of her grassroots activism combined with the exposure to the normative standards of human rights.
Tulika represented IWRAW AP in the negotiations for the Optional Protocol to CEDAW and participated in the International Criminal Court negotiations. She has worked as an expert with the United Nations in the designing and implementation of tools and initiatives to serve women’s rights in complex contexts like Cambodia and Afghanistan.
She restructured and evolved the South Asia Women’s Fund into the present Women’s Fund Asia (WFA), and has been committed to ensuring the centring of the rights-based approach in ensuring resource justice. She served as the executive director of WFA from 2010 to 2022, before stepping down to ensure institutional leadership and advancement for the organisation.
She has served as the co-chair of the board of directors of Prospera, the international network of women’s funds; presently sits on the board of trustees of AALI; is the vice-chair of the board of directors of Women Deliver; and has recently joined the board of directors of the Global Greengrants Fund.
We are delighted to have Tulika join IWRAW Asia Pacific at a dynamic and critical time in the feminist movement and larger sociopolitical climate. We are excited to have someone passionate about institution building, intergenerational leadership, and feminist governance join us to enrich our work. We are confident that with her leadership, IWRAW Asia Pacific’s work on the frontlines of advocacy for women’s human rights and gender equality will continue and grow in ambition and accomplishment.
From IWRAW Asia Pacific’s Board of Directors and team, welcome Tulika!