Dr. Mona Shrestha Adhikari, CEO, EMERGE Pvt. Ltd.

Dr. Mona Shrestha Adhikari has more than 25 years of experience working in the private sector, national and international non-governmental organizations and international organizations.

Her experience ranges from working with organisations like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Trade Centre (ITC) in Geneva, the Economic Policy Incubator project of Department for International Development (DFID)/Palladium Group in Nepal which required working in close coordination with the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Development and the Ministry of Finance of the Government of Nepal. She served as a Gender and Trade Advisor of South Asia Regional Trade Facilitation Programme (SARTFP), a project of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Australian Government.  She has also worked with Action Aid offices in Nepal and Sri Lanka, Forum for Protection of Public Interest (Pro Public), Water Aid in Nepal and the United Nations Development, Regional Office – Bangkok on areas relating to education, child rights, trade and development, women rights and gender equality. Prior to this she also has 7 years of experience working with a joint-venture commercial bank, Nepal Indosuez Bank.

She has conducted extensive studies and published on the topics of judicial gender equality, gender and trade and various contemporary socio-economic issues and presented papers at a number of international conferences. Her chapter “Nepalese new women workers in the hotel industry: Exploring women’s work and respectability,” is published in a book titled Rethinking New Womanhood: Practices of Gender, Class, Culture and Religion in South Asia in 2018 by Palgrave Macmillan, United Kingdom.

She holds a PhD in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Warwick (UK), Master of Arts (MA) in Development Studies specializing on women, gender and development from the Institute of Social Studies (the Netherlands) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from University of Pune (India)