• leadership Training at Mehergarh

• Training Concept
• Photos of the Last Camps
• Future Trainings on Leadership

• Struggle against Bonded Labour

• Research
• Film: Marwa’s Story
• Struggle for Policy & Legislative Changes

• Violence against Women

• Work on Violence Against Women
• Founding Bedari, A crisis Center in Pakistan

• Sexual Harassment at Work Place

• Awareness Programs on the Issue
• Policy and Legislation Work
• Mobilization of stakeholders on the Issue
• Taxonomy of Sexual Harassers
• Statement of Demands from Working Women

• Culture and Folklore

• Cultural Profile
• Manganhaar Music Revival
• A paper on Women in Folklore

• Gender and Development

Dr Fouzia Saeed was instrumental in forming a network called AASHA (An Alliance Against Sexual Harassment, www.aasha.org.pk) in Pakistan. Six organizations form the core membership of AASHA with several hundred individuals and organizations that serve as partners and friends of AASHA and are fully committed to eradicate sexual harassment in Pakistani society.

  Dr Fouzia Saeed was adamant that the Alliance should be focused on sexual harassment at the workplace first as the structured environment of a workplace, a management that has some responsibility and rules and regulations that can hold people accountable were the key elements she thought would help institutionalize some basic changes in the work culture. Eliminating sexual harassment in the streets, markets, homes and informal work places, she thought, was more challenging and should be dealt with later, once the trends of reducing sexual harassment at in work environments were in place. Thus, the Alliance first decided to deal with formal workplaces by engaging their managements, making the employees aware of the issue and its consequences and involving the government and other stake holders in developing an anti-sexual harassment policy.

  A Code of Conduct was developed after rigorous consultations. Dr Saeed did the initial draft of the policy and kept making amendments according to the feedback given in the consultations by academicians, government officials, civil society representatives, intellectuals, labour representatives and those of employees. She facilitated the process on behalf of AASHA and kept the integrity of the Code which was later named as The Code of Conduct for Gender Justice. 

   Although Dr Saeed has been working seriously on the issue of sexual harassment at the workplace since 1997, her work on violence against women spans over two and a half decades (1984 – 2009). During this time, she also focused on sexual harassment which is one form of violence against women. Her attention became more focused on this particular issue when she found herself trapped in a systematic sexual harassment scenario by several of her managers when she was working for a agency of the UN in Pakistan.   She began to fully understand the challenges that a woman faces in those circumstances. Despite being competent, well respected and committed to her career she had to take the huge risk of reporting the main culprit. She and ten other colleagues, who joined her in making the complaint, fought the case for nearly two years and finally won. The case changed the work environment in the entire UN system with changes to tighten up their own policies and currently this is one of the most important issues on which their management is trained and assessed.

In Pakistan, the 22nd of December is marked as the day to address sexual harassment at the work place by civil society because of this case. Dr. Fouzia Saeed and the other ten women submitted their complaint on the 22nd of December in 1997 to the UN management. Their effort in fighting the landmark case has been acknowledged by the UN system as well as the Pakistani civil society.