Rafat Yasmin

Rafat Yasmin is a gender and social inclusion professional with more than 15 years of experience working with the UN, UKaid- and USAID-supported programmes, international development organisations and civil society platforms across Pakistan. Her work combines community engagement, research, documentation and storytelling, with a particular focus on women’s agency, livelihoods, participation and representation.

Rafat has worked directly with women and communities in all four provinces of Pakistan, including rural and disadvantaged settings, and has experience with initiatives that connected women’s handicrafts and traditional skills with markets and opportunities for economic empowerment. Her field engagement has brought her into contact with women artisans, artists and community practitioners whose creative work is closely connected to local histories, traditions, livelihoods and identities. This experience has informed her interest in documenting women not simply as beneficiaries or subjects, but as creators, knowledge holders and custodians of cultural heritage.

Through UN, UKaid, USAID and civil society-supported programmes, Rafat has worked with women from marginalised communities on strengthening their voice, leadership, civic and political participation, access to opportunities and collective agency. More recently, she has supported women from disadvantaged communities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab to participate in WECON in Islamabad, creating opportunities for their work, perspectives and experiences to enter wider national spaces.

Her work has involved extensive engagement with community organisations, women’s groups, artists, media and grassroots partners, alongside research into social and cultural issues. She has developed case studies, publications, training and communication materials and documented community experiences, with an interest in how women’s contributions and histories are preserved, represented and transmitted across generations. Her exposure to literature and cultural documentation has further strengthened her interest in the intersection of memory, heritage, creativity and women’s lives.

Rafat also brings practical experience in script writing, developing narratives and reviewing visual and communication content through a gender lens, assessing how women and marginalised communities are represented in the documentation of rural stories and in public narratives. In the areas of content review and creation, she brings together field experience, gender analysis and an appreciation of Pakistan’s diverse cultural traditions to help create nuanced stories that foreground women’s voices, creativity and agency.