International Development

Country experience:

Field-based: Kenya, Belarus, Tanzania, Sri Lanka and
India
Desk-based: North Macedonia, Malawi, Somalia, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, South Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Senegal, Zambia, Uganda, Myanmar, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, Japan, Colombia, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Cameroon,  Côte D’Ivoire, Niger, Mali, Chad.

I am an experienced researcher and practitioner with crucial subject knowledge, skills and experience in key sectors addressed in development.

Monitoring and Evaluation

I have created dedicated M&E frameworks for development research projects, monitoring tools and results ranking systems for practical development programmes, and provide regular M&E quality assurance services (peer review) as a panel member of the UK government Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) (formerly Department for International Development (DfID)) EQUALS (Evaluation Quality Assurance and Learning Services) Service.

Subject Specialist

As a knowledge specialist in gender and social inclusion, public health, climate resilience and adaptation, social development, infrastructure and urban development and music & community-based arts, I have acted as a thematic adviser to development programmes, on programme proposals and bids to FCDO and DfID, as a reviewer of bids to win DfID contracts to deliver practical healthcare services, and as a researcher designing a mixed methods research study for UNDP, creating baseline profiles and writing books and case studies on development topics.

Media and Stakeholder Engagement

As an experienced former BBC World Service journalist, I spent two years as a Media Adviser with the Media Trust‘s scheme for journalists to give pro-bono advice to NGOs to help them improve their media and public profiles. I worked with many development NGOs addressing (and including) key issues: health (Health Poverty Action), environment (Water Aid), human rights (Article 19; Iranian and Kurdish Womens Rights Organisation), refugees (Refugee Council, Kresy Siberia Foundation), poverty (Children in Need India) and globalism (Think Global). I provided a range of advice and assistance: content reviews, media training, angles, assistance with writing press releases and verbally pitching to media producers and journalists. I also worked briefly as a press officer at Christian Aid and assisted with the publicity for an event unveiling Amartya Sen’s Multidimensional Poverty Index (co-organised by the University of Oxford and UNDP).

Through my combination of journalism and media training, and social science research and applied practice in the engineering, health, NGO, and policy sectors, I am ideally placed to lead complex engagement processes. I know and have successfully implemented many methods of stakeholder engagement. These include: