Saba Aslam is currently a Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

She is a former Project Lead within the Social Equity pillar at Samuel Hall. Saba contributes to projects focusing on decent work and basic services such as housing and WASH in fragile contexts. She brings with her over six years of research experience in urban inequalities, infrastructural services in cities, and urban governance in South Asia region. She holds a postgraduate degree from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Her dissertation examined the complex relationships that the urban poor engage in to acquire infrastructural services (housing, water and sanitation) that put them in economic, social, and political peripheries. Saba is a mixed methods researcher and has extensive experience in designing quantitative surveys, qualitative studies.

Saba also has contributed to global policy agendas in development cooperation and urban governance and has worked with international research groups such as the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Social Science in Humanitarian Action platform (SSHAP), and funding agencies such as DFID and the World Bank. She is currently part of a consortium on women’s struggles in South Asia where she is leading a longitudinal study on how women informal workers experience backlash when they organise. Saba is also a meritorious scholar at the Young Water Professionals, Pakistan chapter where she volunteers with young people to advance rights on water access in global south settings.

Previously, Saba was teaching an undergraduate course on Water Infrastructures and Development at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi. She was also the lead researcher for a qualitative study on water infrastructures at Habib University. Saba also worked as a researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR), a think-tank based in Karachi.