Fatma is a PhD candidate and researcher at the Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Fatma's research work and interests are in various topics related to social and financial inclusion, alternative and inclusive economic structures, forced displacement and refugee studies, the social determinants of health, and feminist methodologies.
After graduating with an MSc in Social Business and Microfinance in 2015, Fatma joined the Yunus Centre as a researcher on a two-year project funded by the Scottish Government's Chief Scientist Office – "fair credit, health and wellbeing: eliciting the perspectives of low-income individuals (FinWell)" with Professor Cam Donaldson, Professor Rachel Baker, Dr Olga Biosca and Dr Neil McHugh and colleagues across the third sector.
Fatma was also one of the lead researchers in the FinWell Covid research study, funded by The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The FinWell Covid study was established in early 2021 to identify, in-depth, changes induced by Covid-19 itself, and the associated policies and restrictions, on the social determinants of health among people living on low-to-moderate income and at risk of financial exclusion.
Fatma's PhD research focuses on exploring the experiences of refugee women in the UK with financial instability, and how their financial coping mechanisms affect their inclusion. The PhD project is supervised by Professor Olga Biosca, Dr Neil McHugh, Professor Rachel Baker and PhD advisor Dr Ima Jackson.
During her work at the Yunus Centre, Fatma developed an interest in progressing the longitudinal and multi-layered research method, Financial Diaries. Fatma's work aimed at adapting the method to be used in poverty and health research in a developed economy context, such as the UK, as well as establishing the potential for the research technique to provide new insights and nuances into the lived experiences of marginalised populations.
Fatma has worked as a module tutor and occasional lecturer in the Social Finance module, which is part of the GCU-based MSc Social Innovation. Fatma also supervised MSc dissertations on social enterprise and women empowerment and worked as an occasional lecturer at GCU-based programmes in Finance, Investment and Risk and Accounting and Risk Management.
In 2021, Fatma was awarded the Royal Society of Edinburgh Early Career Fellowship and worked for six months as a visiting fellow at the Montpellier Business School in France.
Recent publications:
Ibrahim, F., McHugh, N., Biosca, O., Baker, R., Laxton, T., & Donaldson, C. (2021) Microcredit as a public health initiative? Exploring mechanisms and pathways to health and wellbeing. Social Science & Medicine, 270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113633
Biosca, O., McHugh, N., Ibrahim, F., Baker, R., Laxton, T., & Donaldson, C. (2020). Walking a Tightrope: Using Financial Diaries to Investigate Day-to-Day Financial Decisions and the Social Safety Net of the Financially Excluded. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 689(1), 46–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716220921154