Jane is a global practitioner with expertise in gender-based violence prevention, men’s engagement in equal care work, masculinities, and sexual and reproductive health rights. With over 15 years of experience in the gender equality field, her work centres on developing and learning from innovative, gender-transformative approaches to ending violence against women and children while promoting greater health and relationship well-being.

Jane enjoys working in collaborative partnerships, particularly with feminist NGOs in the Global South, to co-create and evaluate evidence-based programming. She has led global campaigns on gender-equitable fatherhood, organised conferences on challenging the unequal caregiving divide, developed evidence-based gender-transformative curricula to prevent violence against women and children, and designed numerous capacity-building initiatives focused on these pressing issues.

Jane is based in Dakar, Senegal, with her husband and daughter. She enjoys reading fantasy novels, tinkering with skincare products, and watching her daughter grow up too quickly.

[email protected]
Canada

Oluwatobiloba Ayodele is a Nigerian feminist with over six years of experience writing to inspire feminist realities. Her career is dedicated to supporting social justice advocacy and movements by ensuring they have the resources and visibility needed to advance systemic change. 

Oluwatobiloba enjoys storytelling from a decolonial perspective. She has previously worked with Vision Spring Initiatives and the pan-African feminist leadership organisation – Akina Mama wa Afrika. She is the co-dreamer of Liberation Alliance Africa. She permits to be called Tobs and enjoys hosting her friends. 

Oluwatobiloba attended Caleb University, where her first-class honours thesis explored brand management and sales growth in the private sector in Nigeria. She is an African Feminist Macroeconomic Academy (AFMA) alumni and a Margret Ekpo Youth Fellow. Oluwatobiloba is currently based in London, Canada.

Riju is a communications and digital media professional with over five years of experience working in civil society and international development organisations. She is drawn to harnessing the power of social media and communications to drive meaningful causes. Her work is inspired by her belief in gender justice and decolonial methodologies in development.

In 2022, Riju received the Chevening Scholarship from the UK government, allowing her to pursue a Master’s degree at the University of Sussex, specialising in children, youth, and gender equality.

Currently based in Kathmandu, Nepal, Riju has a deep love for travel, relishing the opportunity to immerse herself in the culture and history of new places. She lives by the mantra “Work. Save. Travel. Repeat.”

[email protected]
South Africa

Crystal Dicks is a feminist activist, development practitioner, popular educator and executive manager for over three decades. She has worked with the anti-apartheid movement, grassroots organisations, international NGOs, UN agencies, the international labour movement and academia. Her work on gender equality and gender-based violence has been at the intersection of programming, research, policy and capacity development.

While her experience is varied, her passion resides in being a Freire’ian-based educator. Her work resides in designing learning in a participatory, gender transformative and learner-centred way. She has designed and developed capacity-strengthening outputs, including running a fellowship on health equity, designing a feminist fellowship, producing GBV learning and advocacy guides, producing short film scripts on sexual harassment, and developing a multimedia capacity development resource. This work is complemented by a Master’s in Organisational Change and Development.

Crystal is based in Johannesburg, and when not working in advancing gender justice, she can be found stuck in a book, preparing a meal for friends and learning endless new knowledge from her teen daughter.

[email protected]
Kenya

Lina is a paediatrician and clinical epidemiologist with over 12 years of experience in health system strengthening, research, policy, and service delivery. She has provided technical advice on designing and implementing projects to ministries of health and local organisations in various African countries.

Lina is passionate about fighting for gender equality and addressing social injustice. Her dream is to see a world where women and children are safe, healthy, and happy. She has contributed to international policies, training curricula, and service delivery standards on violence against women and their children and has been involved in the scale-up of response services to over 120 public health facilities in Kenya.

She is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and when not busy fighting for the rights of women and children, Lina can be found travelling, reading, or cooking. She loved reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and her favourite dish is the Luo delicacy kuon gi rech.

[email protected]
Belgium

Kate is a gender and public health specialist with 14 years of experience working with grassroots organisations, international NGOs, government institutions, and United Nations agencies. Her work includes developing and adapting programming to prevent violence against women and children, researching and evaluating programme implementation, and capacity strengthening.

She is passionate about the potential of gender-transformative programmes with parents and couples to prevent family violence, advance gender equality, and interrupt intergenerational cycles. She strongly advocates using rigorous evidence and practitioner-based knowledge to enable effective, quality, and evidence-based programming.

Kate is based in Brussels, Belgium, and enjoys drinking (too much) coffee, reading, interior design, and exploring new places with her husband and daughter.

[email protected]
Canada

Kathy is a development specialist focusing on the capacity development of individuals and organisations using an inclusive, participatory approach. A facilitator of both process and learning, in recent years Kathy has focused on feminist, innovative approaches and on strengthening organisational capacity.

With over 10 years of managing global virtual teams and organisations, Kathy is a strong believer in inclusive and open management and emphasises communication as a key component of organisational and partnership success. She has worked across a number of sectors, including girls’ education, water and sanitation, local governance, and youth entrepreneurship. Over the past 25 years, Kathy has worked in partnership with NGOs, national and local governments in a number of African countries, and the Government of Canada and its multilateral partners.

Kathy is currently based in Ottawa, Canada. When she’s not working, Kathy is an avid reader and is happy to share or receive recommendations on what to read next.

[email protected]
United Kingdom

Tania has over 12 years of experience as a strategic communications expert based in London, United Kingdom. She designs communication plans, media for development projects, and research uptake strategies.

Tania has worked on communication and media projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. She always works closely with media and communication partners in the country to ensure that projects are context-specific and locally owned. With an eye for storytelling, she has lectured on this subject at universities around the United Kingdom as well as commissioned multimedia projects on international development.

She has also advised organisations on developing strategies to ensure research uptake. In her spare time, she loves watching films, which often inspires her to plot the next adventure.

[email protected]
United States of America

Lori has over 30 years of experience working in the fields of gender equality, violence against women, and women’s sexual and reproductive healthーfirst as an activist practitioner and later as a researcher.

She is an internationally recognised expert on the prevention of intimate partner violence in low- and middle-income countries and played an important role in getting violence against women onto the global health agenda. Lori is passionate about bridging the worlds of research and practice, advocacy and evidence, and local and global knowledge. She loves mentoring young women, listening to podcasts, and contemplating the feminist retreat centre she hopes to create in retirement.

In addition to her work with the Collaborative, Lori is a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.

[email protected]
United States of America

Ruti is a gender and public health specialist with more than a decade of research and programmatic experience in gender equity and violence prevention.

She has worked across multiple sectors—including health, education, parenting, and economic empowerment—with a particular focus on developing and evaluating gender-transformative and male-engagement interventions in low- and middle-income countries.

In recent years, her work has focused on designing and disseminating research (including programme monitoring and evaluation, in-depth qualitative studies, national surveys, and randomised controlled trials) and on ensuring that research findings and lessons learned are shared broadly, targeted to different audiences, and relevant to both programme development and policy advocacy. She is based in Washington, DC, United States, and enjoys food, travel, good conversations, and chasing after her toddler.

[email protected]
Thailand

Dominique is a specialist in the prevention of violence against women and girls, with over a decade’s experience working with grassroots organisations, international NGOs, and United Nations agencies.

She has worked in diverse low-resource settings across Asia and the Pacific, including humanitarian, conflict-affected, and development contexts. Her work includes providing ongoing technical accompaniment to nontraditional actors working to prevent violence against women and girls, including faith-based organisations, disability rights activists, and organisations working with adolescent girls, as well as service delivery organisations and national governments.

All her work emphasises capacity development, local ownership, and sustainability of initiatives while ensuring that violence prevention interventions are aligned with best practice and centre the safety and voices of women and girls. Dominique is based in northern Thailand, loves the mountains, and wishes they were a little closer to the sea.

[email protected]
United Kingdom

Lyndsay has over 25 years of professional experience in research, programme design and evaluation, technical assistance, training and facilitation, and policy advice in international development, including in fragile and conflict-affected contexts in Africa and Asia.

For the last 15 years, she has focused on gender equality, gender-based violence, women’s and girls’ empowerment, and social inclusion. Lyndsay set up and managed the Violence Against Women and Girls Helpdesk (funded by the UK Department for International Development) and supported the What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls Programme. She has worked with a number of donors, United Nations agencies, NGOs and women’s rights organisations.

She is passionate about using participatory approaches and coaching to support others to work for personal and collective well-being and social justice. Lyndsay is currently based in Brighton, United Kingdom, and spends her spare time reading, writing, running, sea swimming, and doing yoga.

[email protected]
Rwanda

Ritha has over 10 years of experience working as a practitioner in the field of violence against women and girls prevention. She is skilled in programming for violence prevention, with a focus on working with couples and engaging men and boys for violence prevention.

She also has experience programming for and with adolescent girls from her role as a partnership manager at Girl Effect Rwanda. Working at the Rwanda Men’s Resource Centre, she has contributed (as both a training designer and facilitator) to building capacity for local NGOs to integrate male engagement approaches into their violence against women and girls prevention work.

She has played an active role in the design and implementation of the Indashyikirwa programme, which has been proven to reduce violence among intimate partners in Rwanda. Ritha is based in Kigali, Rwanda. She loves cooking and travelling. Coming from a landlocked country, her dream destinations are close to the beach!

[email protected]
Colombia

Ana Lucía is a Colombian social communicator and psychologist, who has committed to build narratives with others from a social, community and participatory point of view.

She uses a gender approach in her work as a community guide, journalist and graphic designer in recent years.  This has led her to realise the enormous positive effects of storytelling to contribute to empowerment, recognition and rewriting of identities of women and girls in Colombia.

She is an avid reader and writer with a special interest in photography and cinema, but that’s just when she is not running after her dog.

[email protected]
Nepal

Binita has around two decades of experience working as an international development practitioner and is currently based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She has worked in Nepal, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia and Yemen. Her expertise includes communication for development, social and behaviour change (SBC) programming, life skills and social norms programming.

She led a multi-award-winning communication initiative, Saathi Sanga Manka Kura, designed to impart life skills among adolescents in Nepal. This was a revolution in the youth-programming field in Nepal and was acknowledged as an example of best practice globally. In addition, she led the implementation of What Works programmes in Nepal, which is a multi-component SBC intervention combining research and community-based intervention, focusing on targeting harmful social norms that contribute to intimate partner violence.

She has also written a number of manuals and curriculums for the prevention of partner violence and women empowerment in Nepal and for preventing child sexual exploitation in Afghanistan as part of Bacha Bazi practice. Binita loves to travel, cook and try different cuisines when she is not working.

[email protected]
Canada

Erin has 13 years of experience in qualitative research to inform and evaluate gender and health programmes. She coordinated an impact evaluation of the Indashyikirwa programme in Rwanda and led qualitative evaluation research across the What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls portfolio.

She has provided implementation and research support to a range of NGOs and agencies, including the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, the United Nations Development Programme, the Inter-American Development Bank, CARE, Promundo, Oak Foundation, Sonke Gender Justice, and AIDS-Free World. Erin has a PhD in public health from the University of Cape Town and holds honorary positions with the University of Cape Town and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Erin is currently based in Montreal, Canada. In her spare time, Erin enjoys reading, hiking, yoga, making music, and embarking on her recent journey of motherhood to raise a feminist son.

[email protected]
Canada

Fatimah is a financial and administrative specialist with over nine years of experience. She has worked in multiple financial roles in the public and corporate sectors as well as with vulnerable groups as an administrator and a caregiver. 

Fatimah is an International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) specialist with experience in Nigeria and Canada. She is committed to empowering women and girls using her financial skills and expertise. Fatimah is from Nigeria, where she began her career in accounting and obtained her professional designation with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN). She is a mother of three and is currently based in Ottawa, Canada. Fatimah enjoys cooking, hiking and touring new places when she’s not working. 

[email protected]
South Africa

Joy Watson is a senior research associate, author and writer. Her research areas of specialisation are analysing public policy and service delivery, as well as tracking funding flows from the perspective of building social equity. Her research and policy briefs have focused on both prevention and responses to violence, particularly in the area of violence against women and children. She has many years of experience in developing feminist responses to public policy, including as a senior researcher to the South African Parliament, as well working in the global arena. Joy is in the process of finalising her PHD on rape and public policy at the University of Stellenbosch.

Joy is Chair of the board of the Women on Farms project and sits on the Coordinating Committee of the Coalition of Feminists for Social Change. Together with Amanda Gouws, she has co-edited the book, Nasty Women Talk Back, A Collection of Feminist Essays on the Global Women’s Marches’ (Imbali, 2018). Her debut novel, The Other Me, a novel about emotional and psychological violence, was published by Karavan Press in 2022. Joy is also a contributor to Daily Maverick Life. She is based in South Africa.

[email protected]
United Kingdom

Sherri has five years of experience as a communications and network-building specialist within the international development sector. Sherri has worked with research and advocacy organisations such as Sayara International, the Migration Policy Group and the European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights. 

With an early-career background in delivering refugee family support services, Sherri brings an approach focusing on end-user’s needs through a feminist lens. She has a degree in Geography and a Master’s in Migration, Mobility and Development.

Sherri loves to be immersed in the jazz, swing, and blues community, exploring the history and culture of the dance forms and music. She is currently based in the UK with her husband and cat.