Dr Sonia Hoque
Senior Research Associate in Water Security and Society
Profile
Sonia Ferdous Hoque is an environmental social scientist, working as a Senior Research Associate in Water Security and Society for the 100 million initiative building on from the REACH Programme (2016 - 2024). Sonia is part of the leadership team of the ‘SafePani’ model – a results-based funding model for professional water service delivery model for schools and healthcare facilities in Bangladesh co-funded by the Government of Bangladesh and Uptime Catalyst Facility.
Sonia’s research focuses on the nature, drivers and distribution of water risks related to drinking water services in rural areas and small towns in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as urban river pollution linked to the global fashion industry. Drawing on theories of human-environment interactions, her work explores the socio-spatial inequalities in people’s water use behaviour and decision-making through water diary methods, direct observations, and intra-household surveys.
She leads the ‘Water Society Interactions and Sustainable Development’ module and co-leads the ‘Research Design and Skills’ module of the MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management at SoGE. She also co-leads the ‘Water Inequalities, Sustainability and Enterprise’ module of the MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment. She is also the Co-Chair of the Oxford Water Network.
Sonia’s PhD research at the University of Leeds (2016) explored the differential livelihood adaptation to social-ecological change in coastal Bangladesh. She has an MSc in Environmental Management (2011) from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a BSc in Environmental Science (2009) from North South University, Dhaka.
Prior to joining her PhD program, Sonia worked as a Research Associate at the Institute of Water Policy (IWP), NUS (2011 - 2013), where her research focused on the roles of private and public sector in urban water governance and water tariffs in urban domestic and non-domestic sectors.
