Dhanashri Brahme is a postgraduate from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She has more than 24 years of rich experience in gender and rights-based programming as well as in the areas of health, micro-finance and adolescent empowerment, at the grassroots, in the government and with the UN alike.

Dhanashri’s recent employment was with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), as National Programme Specialist, Gender. She was responsible for leading overall programme coordination with a specific focus on gender and rights portfolio management that also included government and partner management. Before UNFPA, she worked with the World Bank and IFAD and assisted the Swa-Shakti Project in association with the Ministry of Women & Child Development, Govt. of India. As an individual consultant, she has worked with clients such as the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude and Seva Mandir, Udaipur. The latter was her first exposure to grassroots development, helping to build a keen sense of programming with an eye to ground realities.