From administration, I moved into project management and then country-level leadership. In Sierra Leone, I delivered health interventions under the constraints of COVID-19. Working with OneFamilyPeople, I also began formal work on disability inclusion alongside the Ministry of Social Welfare and national Organisations of Persons with Disabilities, or OPDs.

My journey then took me to Madagascar, where I served as Country Representative for Maisons des Enfants. There, I led a child-protection programme and learned what it means to hold responsibility for care over time.

In 2022, I moved to Liberia to lead AIFO’s SIDA-funded programme on decent work and disability inclusion. Working with the Ministry of Labour, the private sector and national OPDs, we focused on bringing Liberia’s National Action Plan into practice. My scope has since expanded across Liberia and Guinea-Bissau.

For nearly a decade, I have worked across Sub-Saharan Africa to help close the gap between policies and the lives they are intended to reach. I design and manage programmes that place local ownership, dignity and rights at their centre. 

"What continues to motivate me is not the ambition to bring solutions from outside, but the possibility of walking alongside communities and institutions as they build their own."

Two areas have come to define my technical work: disability inclusion and sexual and reproductive health and rights, or SRHR, and increasingly the space where the two intersect.

I have worked on disability inclusion since 2012 and formally at a senior level since 2018. What I have learned is that inclusion cannot be an add-on to programme design. It has to shape the questions asked from the very beginning: Who is at the table? Whose data is missing? Whose voice is heard when priorities are set?

This is why I have consistently invested in partnerships with OPDs and in the operationalisation of instruments such as National Action Plans and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

My work on SRHR began in Sierra Leone through UNFPA-funded projects and has stayed with me ever since. Persons with disabilities, particularly women and girls, remain among the most excluded from SRHR services and information, even in programmes that describe themselves as universal. Bringing these two agendas together, disability inclusion and SRHR, is, in my view, one of the most consequential frontiers of inclusive development and one where I hope to contribute in the years ahead.

Leadership, for me, has less to do with authority than with the everyday practice of creating the conditions in which others can do their best work. In each country where I have worked, I have led multicultural teams made up of national staff, technical experts, implementing partners and headquarters colleagues. I have come to see my role primarily as one of enabling: setting a clear direction, making space for expertise that is not mine and ensuring that decisions reflect realities on the ground.

Working closely with OPDs and local civil society has taught me that inclusive leadership means being willing to step back as much as to step in. Local organisations often carry deep contextual knowledge and legitimacy that international actors cannot replicate. My responsibility is to strengthen that capacity rather than substitute for it.

Managing programmes in fragile settings has also taught me the value of steadiness. Donor priorities shift and contexts change, but the trust built over time with partners and teams is what keeps interventions coherent. Good leadership, I have found, is patient. It is also honest, including about what we, as international actors, cannot and should not try to do.

What continues to inspire me is the possibility of moving inclusion from the margins to the architecture of development itself: into how programmes are designed, financed and evaluated, and into who leads them.

The most meaningful shift in the years ahead, I believe, will not be another project or policy, but a rebalancing of power in favour of the actors closest to the change we hope to see: OPDs, local civil society and national institutions.

That is the future I want to help build.