Archana Dwivedi is the Director of Nirantar, a feminist resource centre for gender and education that works on issues of young people, empowerment and sexuality. With more than 18 years of work experience, Archana’s major areas of work have been research, training and advocacy on issues of women’s empowerment, girl’s education, young people’s empowerment and capacity building from a feminist lens.
A post-graduate in the area of education, Archana believes in making research accessible to grass roots organisations and thus transcreates her research into training and learning material for facilitators, field based activists and organisations. She is an advocate of creating feminist knowledge by way of critical engagement with issues through research. Her engagement on the issue of gender, sexuality and education is further strengthened by the work at the field level with women and girls belonging to marginalised communities.
Important research conducted by Archana includes a study titled “Landscape Analysis of Early and Child Marriage in India” which explored and mapped the root-causes and impact of early and child marriage from the perspective of gender and sexuality. She had also coordinated a national level study using the lens of gender, to unpack the dominant development discourse of women’s empowerment in the context of Self Help Groups and micro finance.