Dr Sandra Pertek’s project entitled ‘Making Aid Work for Displaced Women’ has secured over £1.2million from the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship award.
The Future Leadership Fellowship (FLF) programme is designed to support talented researchers in universities, businesses and other research and innovation environments with their long-term projects. It allows early career researchers to develop ambitious and important research to tackle global challenges.
The Making Aid Work for Displaced Women project will be led by Dr Sandra Pertek a postdoctoral fellow from the Institute for Research into International Migration & Superdiversity and School of Government at the University of Birmingham.
The project will begin in September 2024 and last four years. Dr Pertek will work across four countries (Bangladesh, Kenya, Turkey and the UK) researching and exploring ways Islamic philanthropy principles can be leveraged to better inform and coordinate humanitarian aid work to achieve more effective outcomes for displaced women. The fellowship aims to better understand different humanitarian traditions and ethics regarding women’s protection and inclusion in displacement contexts.
I am delighted to have become a Future Leadership Fellow, and I am looking forward to beginning this urgent policy-oriented research. This interdisciplinary project will make a major academic contribution by advancing gender, religion and forced migration studies and critical analysis of how Islamic philanthropy in humanitarian action tackles displaced women's violence and exclusion.
Dr Pertek said: “With the numbers of refugees growing yearly due to armed conflict and climate change, the need for inclusive humanitarian aid has ballooned in recent years, and it is estimated that over half of the world’s forcibly displaced people are hosted in Muslim-majority countries. Despite this, the principles of Islamic philanthropy, such as zakat (obligatory charity), sadaqah (voluntary charity) and waqf (endowment) have received little attention regarding their use in supporting women who become forcibly displaced and so lack integration into humanitarian policy and discourse.
The project will include a team of two research fellows, three locally-based research associates and a University of Birmingham-funded PhD student. In addition to the research team, Making Aid Work for Displaced Women will involve humanitarian and academic partners such as leading charities and a multilateral development bank, as well as a range of collaborators including policymakers and practitioners.
Dr Pertek concluded: “I am delighted to have become a Future Leadership Fellow, and I am looking forward to beginning this urgent policy-oriented research. This interdisciplinary project will make a major academic contribution by advancing gender, religion and forced migration studies and critical analysis of how Islamic philanthropy in humanitarian action tackles displaced women's violence and exclusion. The Fellowship will mobilise new voices and resources to build bridges between secular and faith aid actors to centre women's needs and rights in relief work, and so to make it work for displaced women of different backgrounds. We will contribute to developing an inclusive humanitarian scholarship, policy and practice, by connecting different aid paradigms.”
UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the School of Government and School of Social Policy and Society
Dr Sandra Pertek is a Research Fellow in the School of Government, University of Birmingham
