Programmes that hold together when conditions fall apart.

I build organisations. I also keep programmes moving when the ground shifts underneath them.

Twice now I have started something from nothing. YayGyiYar Centre for Positive Change in Myanmar in 2025. The Wellbeing Innovation and Technology Fund, a Dutch-registered foundation, in 2026. In both cases that meant the governance, the registration, the team, the partnership model and the first money.

Before that I spent 3.5 years as senior technical adviser on MyJustice, the British Council’s EU-funded legal reform programme in Myanmar. That included the period after the February 2021 coup. Most of the assumptions the programme was built on stopped being true. The job then was working out what could still be delivered safely, and delivering it.

I have managed multi-donor portfolios. I have raised funding from the EU, DFAT, DFID and LIFT. At UN OCHA I ran grant administration for the Myanmar Humanitarian Fund and cut processing time for civil society partners by three quarters.

• Organisational set-up & governance
• Multi-donor portfolio management
• Fundraising & proposal development
• Donor compliance
• Conflict-sensitive delivery
• Partnership & consortium management

My interest is in how social policy actually gets made. Who negotiates it. Who it reaches. Who it quietly misses.

That began academically. My doctorate examined the politics of social policy in Kenya. It looked at how aid, ethnicity and redistribution shape what a government chooses to provide. My master’s research examined São Paulo’s deliberative health councils. Most of my career since has been spent on the delivery side of the same question.

In Myanmar I provided technical support to two national social protection programmes delivering cash transfers through the health and education systems. I monitored a maternal health programme that later on covered 11,588 women across 338 villages. I supported analysis for an education cash transfer evaluation framework that was later taken to national scale.

For UNDP I led research on civil service reform during the democratic transition. Earlier, at UNESCO, I worked on the Education for All Global Monitoring Report. In Kenya I led a participatory youth research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. It brought Christian, Catholic and Muslim youth networks into Nairobi’s local government planning processes.

Gender equality and social inclusion runs through all of this. It does not sit alongside it.

• Social protection & cash transfers
• Public sector & civil service reform
• Participatory governance
• Gender equality & social inclusion
• Health & education policy
• Policy uptake & advocacy

Over ten years designing evaluations and MEL systems. Most have been national in scale. Most were for clients who intended to act on the findings.

I have led or co-led national evaluations of police family and sexual violence units in Papua New Guinea, of school grant funding for primary education, and of eighteen years of Australian investment in the justice and law sector. On MyJustice I co-designed three independent programmatic evaluations, delivered by Innovation for Poverty Action. I also built the MEL framework that kept producing usable evidence through the coup.

The part I care most about is what happens after the report lands. An evaluation nobody uses is an expensive document. Alongside the formal studies I build the less glamorous infrastructure that lets a programme change course while it is still running. Participatory monitoring tools. Quarterly learning events. Feedback loops.

Methodologically I work across qualitative and participatory approaches, quasi-experimental designs, and survivor-centred, conflict-sensitive data collection.

• National-scale evaluation
• MEL system design
• Theory of change
• RCTs & quasi-experimental design
• Participatory monitoring
• Survivor-centred methods
• Organisational learning