Former Associate Director, Women’s Empowerment Program

Barbara Rodriguez has extensive academic and professional experience on women’s rights and gender. She joined The Asia Foundation in 2009, and is served as the assistant director for the Women’s Empowerment Program until 2019. Ms. Rodriguez worked closely with the Foundation’s field offices and provides technical assistance on a range of women’s empowerment issues including access to justice, violence against women, political participation, women’s rights within an Islamic framework, economic engagement, education, gender-responsive police reform, and human trafficking. In addition, she played a lead role in supporting gender analysis and mainstreaming across the Foundation’s program areas, which includes co-designing and implementing participatory gender mainstreaming trainings for Foundation staff that incorporate sessions on gender analysis frameworks and gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation.

In addition, Ms. Rodriguez has expertise on and a long-standing commitment to ending violence against women. Prior to joining the Foundation, she worked as a gender researcher for UNDP in Cambodia, where she conducted an extensive mapping of NGOs engaged on improving awareness and implementation of the Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of Victims. She also designed and facilitated a gender training for UNDP staff working to improve women’s access to justice. In addition, Ms. Rodriguez has published an article on Turkey’s domestic violence law in Princeton University’s Journal of Public and International Affairs, provided a range of immigration legal services to domestic violence and human trafficking survivors in New York, and volunteered as a domestic violence victim advocate in Iowa.

Education: Ms. Rodriguez holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Grinnell College.