About us

The FEM Network is a knowledge powerhouse making insight and foresight on sustainable development in the Global South, accessible and actionable. It bridges the gap between research and practice, creates opportunities for cross pollination and inspires collective action.

About the Founder
Karuna Mintaka Kumar

Over the course of my career, I have sat across from Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the seventh Director-General of the World Trade Organization, and asked her what trade multilateralism really owes the world’s most excluded economies. I have deliberated with Hon. Bayisenge Jeannette, Minister for Gender and Family Promotion in Rwanda, at the Kigali Global Dialogue on what it means for women’s rights and representation to coexist meaningfully with policy. I have made the case at ILO’s Evidence for Policymaking conference for why decent work cannot be built on data that refuses to see women. I have explored with UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Bureau Director Haoliang Xu, as part of the senior leadership program, what systems leadership truly demands when the systems themselves are failing. These are conversations I carry with me, not as credentials, but as reminders of what is actually at stake, and how much remains unfinished.

Across five continents — Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and Africa — I have worked in spaces where sectors converge and often collide. I have worked within the architecture of multilateral organisations and international NGOs (UNDP, UNICEF, World Economic Forum), inside corporate strategy and sustainability teams (Nestle, Lloyds Banking Group, Citibank, GlaxoSmithKline, IKEA), within research and think-tank environments (Observer Research Foundation, Thomson Reuters Foundation), and in media (The Wall Street Journal, MINT, NDTV). Each taught me something the others could not. The multilaterals taught me scale and persistence. The corporate world taught me what accountability to outcomes actually feels like. Research taught me rigour and patience. Journalism taught me that clarity is not a concession; it is the whole point.

By training, I arrived at this work from several directions at once: journalism (Columbia University), management (University of Westminster), international affairs and public policy (University of California – San Diego). Disciplines that do not always speak easily to each other, but whose tensions I have found enormously productive. The journalist in me asks who is missing from the story. The policy analyst asks what the evidence actually shows. The strategist asks what it would take to do something differently. Together, they have shaped a way of working that refuses to stay in one lane, and a way of writing that I hope reflects it.

Asia-Pacific is the region I know most intimately, and the one I find most intellectually alive. It is where the biggest questions about the energy transition, emerging-market development, gender equity, and democratic resilience are being answered in real time. Often imperfectly, but always consequentially. It is also where the gap between what the research shows and what policy does can feel most disheartening, and most worth closing.

The FEM Network, which I founded, was an attempt to do exactly that: a knowledge platform dedicated to making rigorous, evidence-based insights on sustainable development in the Global South accessible and actionable, bridging the gap between research and the practitioners who need it most. The research I published reached across disciplines and geographies — the gendered economics of the global energy transition; how South Africa’s shift away from coal is exacting a disproportionate cost on its most vulnerable workers; why clean energy adoption in India cannot be honestly understood without accounting for how patriarchy shapes household energy decisions; and why the green economy, without deliberate intervention, risks deepening the very inequalities it claims to transcend.

I write about sustainable development, gender, the energy transition, and the slow, complicated work of change, for policymakers, businesses, and people alike. Because the most important ideas should not have to choose between being rigorous and being read.