England, United Kingdom
I am an international human rights and development leader with a decade of experience spanning labour rights and economic justice, disability inclusion, and climate justice. I lead global thematic strategy, senior specialist teams, and multi-country programmes advancing a human rights approach to economic, civic and political inclusion across Africa and South Asia. A consistent thread throughout my career has been translating evidence into policy influence, strategic programming, and systemic change, including navigating complex, politically sensitive and authoritarian contexts. I believe that labour rights and disability inclusion are inseparable, and that achieving economic justice for marginalised workers requires building collective power across movements. This shapes my approach to programming, advocacy and partnerships, including pioneering work linking trade unions and organisations of people with disabilities across multiple countries. I provide expert commentary to media and researchers, publish widely across academic and general readership formats, and speak regularly at international conferences. My published work includes peer-reviewed papers, a monograph, research reports, and accessible writing for non-specialist audiences. My work is grounded in deep expertise in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam and Cambodia, alongside broader cross-regional experience across Africa and South Asia.
Direct Sightsavers’ Inclusive Economies and Citizenship portfolio, setting and leading global thematic strategy, a senior specialist team and multi-country programming on disability rights and justice in economic, civic and political systems. Key achievements: - Led organisational transition to Inclusive Economies & Citizenship (IEC): Redesigned legacy economic empowerment approaches into a unified IEC thematic area, embedding the framework across strategy, systems, programmes and funding approaches, and securing organisation-wide adoption that strengthened governance, donor engagement and cross-team collaboration. - Transformed strategic direction: Expanded the thematic beyond a focus on employment to also centre disability rights and justice, integrating labour rights, just transition, social protection and community empowerment, fully rewriting the thematic strategy, securing organisational buy-in, building new partnership relationships and donor pipelines, and winning significant restricted funding. - Built and lead an expanded senior technical team: Developed and now lead a team of five Global Technical Leads (four direct, one matrix-managed) and a Technical Advisor, establishing leadership routines, cross-thematic collaboration and technical coherence across a multi-country portfolio of over $40 million. - Strengthened global leadership on disability-inclusive decent work and labour rights: Positioned Sightsavers as a recognised leader in this area through publications, conference contributions, donor engagement, and new programming models linking unions and Organisations of People with Disabilities (OPDs), piloted across multiple countries.
Labour rights specialist delivering programme coordination, high value proposal development, strategic advocacy, research-to-impact, and pioneering programming in Cambodia, a complex and often hostile environment. Key achievements: - Built programme pipeline and secured funding: Led strategic development of high value proposals across labour rights, trade union development, just transition, and modern slavery, among others, securing over $7.5 million in funding and significantly expanding the country programme’s portfolio. - Led strategic advocacy and campaign support: Coordinated a team providing assistance and mentoring to trade unions in multiple campaigns around union busting, criminalisation of union leaders, collective bargaining, and others - Translated research into tangible outcomes: Recovered and redirected a high-profile research project on BRI investments in Cambodia, leveraging findings for strategic advocacy that helped workers win back stolen wages and strengthened evidence-based campaigning. - Pioneered just transition programming: Secured trade union participation on Cambodia’s national policy body; successfully coached unions to bargain for bipartite workplace heat stress agreements in garment factories, substantially reducing average temperatures and establishing a replicable model for other contexts.
Consulted on a wide range of labour issues, especially focused on Vietnam Key achievements: - Contributed to US government foreign policy deliberations: Advised stakeholders regarding the labour aspects of the US Department of Commerce’s review of Vietnam’s status as a non-market economy, with my published work referenced 14 times in the memorandum. - Provided labour rights briefings to senior political and diplomatic actors: Addressed the EU Domestic Advisory Group under the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement on labour rights developments, briefed UK and US embassy officials, and prepared contributions for ILO processes. - Improved labour standards for digital platform workers: As Principal Investigator for Fairwork Vietnam, conducted a baseline assessment of digital labour platforms’ working conditions, which led to representatives of companies, government and unions agreeing to work together to strengthen social protection for platform workers. - Guided just transition programming: Conducted a strategic assessment of opportunities for just transition engagement in Vietnam for an international NGO, which directly influenced their programme strategy.