Zainab Monisola Olaitan

Zainab Monisola Olaitan, PhD, is a political scientist with expertise in gender and representation, African politics, and peace and conflict studies. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP) at Queen’s University. She is also a research associate at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) and the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (CSRGC), both at the University of Johannesburg.

She completed her PhD degree in political science from the University of Pretoria with her thesis titled ‘Gender quotas and the substantive representation of women in African politics: case studies of Botswana and South Africa’. In 2022, she was awarded the Margaret McNamara Education Grant for her impactful research and advocacy work on women and children. Zainab studied for a Master's degree in political science as a 2019 Mastercard Foundation Scholar, University of Pretoria. In 2018, she was selected as a Mandela Rhodes Scholar to study for a postgraduate honours degree in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Cape Town. In 2016, she completed her first degree in political science from the University of Lagos as the best graduating student in her department.

Zainab’s research focuses on locating women across different sectors with a central question on how women are represented in Africa. She is deeply interested in understanding the impact of women's political participation on the qualitative well-being of African women across different sectors. She has published widely in journals, book projects, and policy briefs on themes bordering on feminist thought, African politics, gender and representation, African indigenous knowledge systems, and peace and conflict studies. Zainab is a member of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS), the African Indigenous knowledge Research Network (AIKRN) and the Sexual Reproductive Justice Coalition.