Zahid Amin Shashoto

Zahid works on water governance, disaster risk management and climate change adaptation with Uttaran—a grassroots NGO in Bangladesh. As a program development officer, he develops strategies and programs using grounded and bottom-up approaches to address the interconnected environmental and social challenges faced by deprived communities in rural Bangladesh as they struggle to adapt to climatic and economic shocks.

Zahid is on a mission to support Bangladesh's coastal people in adapting to climate change and facilitating a transformative change. From a family of academics and activists, Zahid was involved in a diverse range of environmental and social development activities from an early age. He holds a BSc in Environmental Management (2018) from North South University (Dhaka, Bangladesh), and an MSc in Environment Change and Management (2022) from the University of Oxford. His dissertation focused on people's negative coping strategies post-disaster and how humanitarian organizations influence them. The research allowed him to analyze humanitarian organizations' structure, funding mechanisms, and post-disaster response mechanisms through a bottom-up approach.