About Us
Our History
We are Governance Research Institute of Pakistan (GRI), an independent development policy and public-sector platform based in Pakistan. We work across rule of law, human rights, criminal justice, health, education, social inclusion, environmental sustainability and governance. Our focus is on supporting public institutions and development partners in designing and implementing reforms that improve state capability, service delivery and public value.
We are a private limited company in 2022 under the Companies Act, 2017. Our work is grounded in Pakistan’s institutional realities and informed by practical experience at the federal, provincial and local levels. We bring together lawyers, civil servants, policy specialists, researchers and monitoring and evaluation professionals to support complex reform efforts in challenging governance environments.
At the heard of our work is a strong committment to trust, credibility and partnership. We believe lasting reform is built through open, transparent and credible relationships with our counterparts. We place particular emphasis on working constructively with stakeholders at senior-most leadership. We understand the meaningful institutional change requires not only top-level buy-in, but also operational ownership across the full administrative chain. Our approach is therefore collaborative, respectful and rooted in long-term confidence-building.
Areas of work & experience
Our core areas of support include policy design, project management, institutional capacity building, impact assessment, policy research, advocacy and strategic advisory support. We aim not only to contribute ideas, but also to help translate those ideas into operational reforms, measurable improvements and sustainable institutional outcomes.
Our team combines senior leadership with multidisciplinary technical depth. We are led by Barrister Mehr Saleem, Chief Executive Officer and Founding Director, with Barrister Maryam Mamdot serving as Founding Director and board member. Our wide advisory strength includes expertise in governance and public policy, policing and criminal justice, finance, planning and correctional services. This enables us to work across sectors while maintaining strong analytical and implementation capability.
Our experience reflects a strong track record in governance, justice and institutional reform. In Punjab, we worked with Musawi and Punjab Police under a USIP-funded programme on supported the development of a framework for gender-based violence assessments within Punjab Police and contributed to the training of 1,700 female police recruits and 40 transgender victim support officers across the province.
Our experience reflects a broader and evolving body of work in governance, justice, an institutional reform. In Punjab, we worked with Musawi and Punjab Police under a USIP-funded programme on gender-responsive and trauma-informed policing (2023-2024). Through this engagement, we supported the development of a framework for gender-based violence assessments within Punjab Police and contributed to the training of 1,700 female police recruits and 40 transgender victim support officers across the province. We have also contributed to the UK-Pakistan Serious Crime and Law Enforcement (UPSCALE) Programme with Adam Smith International and FCDO (2021-2022), supporting engagement with federal and provincial law-enforcement institutions and contributing to stronger criminal-history data-sharing processes and institutional coordination. These examples form part of a wider pool of experience across public-sector reform, institutional strengthening, and service-delivery improvement. Our broader team experience includes work with a range of bilateral and multilateral partners, including FCDO, USIP, GIZ, UNDP, UNODC, ESCAP, and World Bank, ADB, and AIB.
Beyond justice and governance, our team members bring deep and diverse expertise in environmental sustainability, water governance, health systems, and education policy. Their experience includes contributions to the Indus Basin environmental assessment, institutional restructuring and capacity building for the Punjab Environmental Protection Agency, collaboration with Chatham House on water perception surveys, support to Punjab’s Saaf Pani programme, and representation on the Punjab Chief Minister’s Special Task Force on smog. In the social sectors, team members have also contributed to health systems management, immunisation policy, national vaccine deployment planning, and education-sector analysis. Together, this experience enhances our capacity to support integrated, evidence-based reform and service-delivery priorities in Pakistan.
We offer development partners a Pakistan-based platform with deep contextual understanding, strong public-sector access, and the ability to combine policy insight with implementation support. We are particularly well placed to support assignments requiring policy analysis, stakeholder engagement, institutional strengthening, programme management and reform delivery across governance, justice, social sector and climate related domains.
Governance Research Institute (Ishtiraq) is an independent development policy initiative that specializes in design and implementation of a wide range of public-sector reforms. It brings together like-minded individuals who collectively have decades of experience for a range of sectoral interventions including rule of law, access to legal aid, criminal justice systems, primary and secondary healthcare, social inclusion of marginalized citizens, social protection, human rights, and environmental sustainability. Our team’s past work enables Ishtiraq to cover every aspect critical to governance and service delivery. Whether it is designing interventions, setting agendas for change, actually delivering public services, or monitoring effectiveness of past and existing policies, we have the expertise to do so.
Ishtiraq advocates for innovative policy design and implementation techniques to increase institutions’ capacity to deliver citizen-focused services. We believe in a whole-of-network collaborative approach, which employs citizen-, government- and market-based models to pursue public goals. We also bring the unique ability to leverage the extensive networks that underpin service delivery in Pakistan, with the core team deeply embedded across the development policy ecosystem, both in frontline and advisory roles. This includes sector-focused practitioners, lawyers, policy researchers, as well as behavioral intervention and monitoring/evaluation experts. We aim to continue our collaboration with federal, provincial and local governments as well as international partners to deliver change and create an impact.
Apart from leveraging networks to deliver change, we also strongly advocate the use of data to guide design and implementation. Our core team brings hard analytical skills that rely on creating and utilizing data systems to guide sustainable policy.
Our primary geographical focus is Pakistan with work across the country’s tiers of government. However, our team members have led cross-jurisdictional projects that focus on both bilateral and multilateral interventions. Our team members have also worked with a range of partners for reforms, including multilateral banks such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; multilateral development institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific; as well as bilateral-partnership focused donors such as the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the United States Institute of Peace, and the German Organization for International Cooperation.
We believe collaboration (اشتراک) is the key to respond effectively to complex issues of governance, build partnerships, understand and solve problems, and create public value.