Martha Alter Chen

Martha (Marty) Chen is an Associate at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, where she taught for 35 years, and Co-Founder, Emeritus International Coordinator and board member of the global network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). An experienced development practitioner and scholar, her areas of specialisation are employment, gender, and poverty, with a focus on the working poor in the informal economy.

Before joining Harvard in 1987, she had two decades of resident development experience working in Bangladesh (with the well-known NGO BRAC) and in India (as field representative of Oxfam America) with a focus, in both countries, on the economic empowerment of women from poor households. In 1987, Dr Chen co-founded WIEGO which she then led for 20 years and serves on the board of WIEGO.

Currently, Dr. Chen is also the Chair of the Boards of BRAC Global and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU WIDER).