Shahira is a PhD student in the School of Management at Cardiff Metropolitan University, and is a Cara (Council for At-Risk Academics) scholar from Afghanistan. Prior to her PhD studies, she was a senior lecturer at Herat University’s Faculty of Economics.
Shahira’s MBA was completed in India, at Aligarh Muslim University, after graduating from Herat University with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics.
She has published one international and six national articles in the fields of gender studies and economics and, from 2013 to 2017, served as the dean of the economics faculty at Ghalib University in Herat, Afghanistan’s western province.
In 2016, Shahira founded Mehrsa Company in her hometown of Herat, with the aim of finding decent and skilled employment for women of all ages and backgrounds, which she ran up until the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.