Shahidur Rashid is the Director for the South Asia Office, part of the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, and is based in New Delhi. He is committed to seeing tangible change take place in South Asia. Dr. Rashid has worked on agriculture and food policy issues in Asia and Africa for more than 20 years at IFPRI. As a Senior Research Fellow, he managed several large multi-country projects, fundraising, and influencing policymaking and investment priorities in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. He was based in IFPRI’s regional office in Addis Ababa for five years to conduct research on countries in East and Southern Africa. Dr. Rashid’s research work at IFPRI has included institutional analysis of micro-finance, agricultural wage dynamics, food aid leakage, food grain markets integration, distortions to agricultural incentives, and agricultural price policies in Asia.

Dr. Rashid has also served as a member of the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Among other research, he contributed to a set of diagnostic studies for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that provided the basis for the establishment of the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in Ethiopia. He also co-led the African Agriculture Management Program (AAMP), jointly managed by IFPRI and the Michigan State University. He has co-edited several books.

A native of Bangladesh, Dr. Rashid received his master’s degree in Economics from the Chittagong University, Bangladesh in 1987 and a PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999.