Ayesha is a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia. Her core research area is mobile and Internet usage in Asia, with a particular focus on marginalized segments of the market such as women and the poor. She has over thirteen years of extensive experience in this field, focusing on demand-side data collection and analysis, through mixed methods.

Her recent focus has been on the intersection of gender and ICT adoption. She was recently part of a team that designed and developed a toolkit for World Bank task team leaders on gender mainstreaming in ICT projects, leading on content relating to the policy and regulatory aspects. She also co-led a joint LIRNEasia-GSM Association Connected Women study on mobiles and Internet use among women in Myanmar in 2015 involving collection and analysis of survey and qualitative data. She has also empirically modeled the relationship between adoption of various mobile and Internet services and gender (among other key variables) in various Asian countries over the past eight years.

She has been a part of a team designing and implementing an impact assessment of mobile phone communication in the then recently liberalized Myanmar, using an Instrumental Variable approach.

She also has over a decade of experience in conducting multi-country demand side research with the objective of bringing evidence to the policy process in  ICT as well as electricity sectors. She has experience designing and implementing large-scale and nationally representative surveys as well as focused qualitative research using a variety of methods. Currently she is leading the Asian component of a global data collection initiative to understand what people do after gaining ICT access, and the issues that they face. The Asian component is being conducted in six countries through nationally representative survey research.

Other previous research has included that on the use of mobiles for livelihood-related purposes, the use of telecenters for government information and services, the conditions for mobile commerce applications, in low income contexts.