Ali M. Mir

Dr. Ali M. Mir is Country Director of the Population Council’s Pakistan office, a position he has held since May 2026. Prior to assuming this role, he served as Senior Director of Programs, working to expand access to family planning services through research, training, and advocacy.

More recently, Mir has led and provided strategic oversight to major initiatives supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), including the Delivering Accelerated Family Planning in Pakistan (DAFPAK) programme. This work has focused on developing and testing scalable approaches to accelerate fertility transition and strengthen family planning services in Punjab through private-sector engagement, equitable access to services, data-driven decision-making, client-centered counseling, and social and behavior change communication (SBCC). Under the SBCC component, he also oversaw the WAQFA campaign, a multimedia initiative promoting healthy birth spacing and the nationally endorsed Tawazun narrative around balancing family size with available family resources. These initiatives have supported the Government of Punjab in translating evidence into practical approaches that can be institutionalized and scaled within the health system.

From 2011–2012, Mir directed the Council’s large-scale USAID-funded FALAH project, a multifaceted intervention that increased family planning use by 9 percentage points in focus districts by emphasizing the benefits of birth spacing to women’s and children’s health. In the area of capacity-building, as part of a Packard Foundation–funded activity, Mir developed several training programs for mid-career professionals in conducting social science research.

When he joined the Population Council in 1998, Mir led a training program aimed at introducing a reproductive health–focused framework to government health and population managers. He has also provided oversight to a National Advocacy and Media Campaign on Population Related Issues and Need for Birth Spacing Services supported by UNFPA, aimed at changing the current complacency around population issues.

Mir has served as vice president of the Population Association of Pakistan and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Pakistan.

Mir is a medical doctor and holds an MPH from the University of Leeds, where he was supported by a Chevening scholarship awarded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office to outstanding scholars with leadership potential. He has also completed several postgraduate training courses, including the International Family Planning Leadership Program at the Public Health Institute in Santa Cruz, CA (supported by a Packard-Gates fellowship), the Strategic Leadership in Reproductive Health program at Johns Hopkins University (supported by a Gates fellowship), and a Harvard University executive training program in Health Management. Mir is an adjunct faculty member of the Health Services Academy, Government of Pakistan, and committee member of Courses for Sociology at Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad. He has authored two books for medical students on basic epidemiology and medical demography and has several national and international research publications to his credit.