Ms. Shandana Khan has over 32 years of experience in rural and community-driven development in Pakistan and across South and Central Asia. Her career combines extensive field experience with policy-level engagement, having begun her professional journey with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in northern Pakistan. She is the Chief Executive Officer of the Rural Support Programmes Network (RSPN), Pakistan’s largest civil society network, which she helped establish in 2000. RSPN comprises of nine Rural Support Programmes (RSPs) that have collectively worked with more than 50 million people across rural Pakistan.
With strong leadership, networking and advocacy skills, Shandana provides strategic direction to RSPN and supports the RSPs in scaling their programmes nationally. She has served on numerous government policy committees and task forces and has contributed to public-sector poverty reduction strategies, including local government legislation and federal and provincial policy frameworks. She has also played a key role in mobilising resources and providing strategic and technical support to the RSPs, bringing grassroots experience and evidence into national policy and development processes.
Shandana has extensive experience in promoting the replication of the RSP approach across South Asia. Under UNDP’s South Asia Poverty Alleviation Programme, she supported replication initiatives in the Maldives and Nepal and has facilitated knowledge exchange between Pakistan’s RSPs and comparable programmes internationally, including the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in India. From 2014 to 2016, she served as Director, Rural Development at the Aga Khan Foundation Afghanistan, where she supported the replication of savings and credit groups for women and men in northern Afghanistan.
Shandana has extensive experience working in multicultural environments and has contributed to cross-border cultural and development exchanges involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. She assisted in the translation of the autobiography of Pashtun leader Bacha Khan, My Life and Struggle, from Pashto into English, as well as other Pashto literature, as part of these cross-border initiatives.
She is fluent in English, Pashto and Urdu and has working knowledge of French and Russian. Shandana holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi, a Tripos in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and a Master’s degree in International Public Policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.