Ms. Nizami did her Bachelors and Masters in Forestry from Pakistan Forest Institute in Peshawar. Her specialization was in Farm and Energy Forestry Management / Agro-forestry. She is currently undertaking her PhD in Natural Resource Governance form Wageningen University, Rural Development Sociology Group, the Netherlands. She currently holds the position of Programme Coordinator Pakistan in Intercooperation Pakistan in a joint capacity with her Swiss counterpart. Intercooperation (IC) is a Swiss NGO with its Headquarters in Bern, Switzerland. IC operates in 23 countries around the world, including Pakistan. Her responsibilities in IC Pakistan include overall programme management, backstopping projects and providing thematic and technical support and networking. Her fields of experience include management of natural resources, particularly collaborative forest management, farm forestry, non timber forest produce, conflict management in natural resource management, dryland management and policy. Other areas include project /programme cycle management, monitoring and evaluation, institutional development of NGOs (local/national), workshops facilitation and documentation. She has been extensively engaged in institutional reforms in NWFP Forest Department and in other policy dialogues related to NRM at national level.

Prior to joining Intercooperation, she served an NGO called Balochistan Rural Support Programme (BRSP), previously Pak-German Self Help Project, in 1993 as Programme Specialist Agro-forestry. In BRSP she streamlined a Social Forestry Master Plan, which received funding from USAID and Government of Balochistan. She also introduced and implemented Range Management and training programmes in Balochistan. She joined Enterprise and Development Consulting (EDC) as Assistant Manager Natural Resources in 1996. She was assigned to work as Advisor Monitoring and Evaluation for the Dutch funded Social Forestry Project Malakand-Dir up in the North West Frontier Province. Later, she served DHV Consultants BV on the same position. She studied effects of the project interventions (extension, community forestry, village land use planning, institutional development) in the project areas. She also developed computerized monitoring programmes and trained Forest Department staff to apply these in their working. She is proficient in Urdu, English, Hindi and Pashto with some skills in Persian and some local languages spoken in Pakistan. She is/has remained on Steering Committees/Board of Governors of a few international organizations and national NGOs including LEAD Pakistan (1999-2004).

She is a member of Cohort 4 and participated in trainings in Costa Rica, Japan and Zimbabwe. She also represented LEAD International Delegation in World Science Conference UNESCO/ICSU) in Budapest, Hungary. Born in 1971, married in 1998 and has two children.