Saba is currently a Research Assistant/member of the IDS Cities cluster. She is researching about the role played by local governments, actors, and city networks in advancing the Agenda 2030. Her research interests include examining the sources of marginality and vulnerability across poor neighbourhoods in southern cities, particularly through the lens of infrastructures (like urban land, housing, water, and sanitation). Saba is also studying women’s strategies that help sustain their power against contemporary backlash within the market and state spaces in Pakistan as part of the Sustaining Power project led by the IDS.

Saba completed an MA in Poverty and Development from the IDS. Her dissertation examined the complex relationships that the urban poor engage in to acquire essential services that often put them in economic, social, and political peripheries. Previously, Saba worked as a researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR), a think-tank based in Karachi and is currently a visiting researcher there. At CSSR, Saba assisted in a number of studies spanning across a range of themes including rural women’s work in agriculture, social protection, service delivery issues in low-income urban communities. In much of the research, Saba has contributed by co-drafting research tools, collecting data in the field, training field researchers, and analysing qualitative data and assisting in reporting.