Martha Chen (née Alter; born February 9, 1944) is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER).Martha is a development practitioner and scholar who has worked with the working poor in India, South Asia, and around the world. Her areas of specialization are employment, poverty alleviation, informal economy, and gender. She lived in Bangladesh working with BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations, and in India, as field representative o