Achieve social impact, using my experience in program management, community operations, and learning design.

Situation

Tanzania needed to upgrade Clinical Assistants to a Diploma in Clinical Medicine, so they could become Clinical Officers and strengthen primary healthcare leadership. Taking them out of rural clinics to study would have collapsed the rural workforce, so learning had to happen on the job. That meant a tablets-based blended course combining app-based self-study, quarterly in-person instruction and clinic-based mentorship.

Task

As Project Lead, I oversaw a program with a budget of about USD 595,000 over two years, leading a multi-cultural team of 8 across three time zones and a 22-member Technical Working Group of Ministry of Health clinical experts, tutors, policy leaders and ed-tech specialists. I ran the curriculum re-development, pre-testing of the app-based content, the M&E protocol and the in-person sessions in colleges across the country.

Action

• Stakeholders had just rejected a consultant-led curriculum, so I set up a Technical Working Group with all of them represented. We used the original as a starting point to re-develop a co-created curriculum.
• I designed and piloted a revolving fund: seed capital from development partners paid the set-up costs (120 tablets, the eLearning platform, printed modules), and each cohort’s subsidized tuition was reinvested to fund the next, so that from the second cohort onward the program paid for itself.
• Using the gender lens from my M.A. in Gender and Development Studies, I traced the ~30% attrition in Tanzania’s earlier distance-education programs, mostly women, to tech constraints worsened by social norms and compounding workloads. In response, I secured Ministry letters informing spouses, fathers and supervisors that learners would need support at home and work, and tweaked the mentorship system to match women with female mentors.
• I built a daily peer-learning session into the in-person weeks, so learners could bring in their lived experience.

Situation

The program was envisioned as a training program for women across 12 African countries. The aim was to increase women’s access to, and autonomy over, financial resources, while community resistance stood in the way.

Task

As Regional M&E, Knowledge Management and Communications Advisor, I co-designed and iterated the program approach over four years, working remotely across the 12 countries.

Action

• I used Human-Centered Design to develop the program, which redefined its pathway: it had been envisioned as a training program but became a multi-pronged approach.
• I used the Reach, Benefit, Empower, Transform (RBET) framework from IFPRI to design activities that increased women’s access to and autonomy over financial resources, while reducing community resistance.
• I co-designed and iterated a capacity-strengthening approach that combined a 6-day in-person Gender Makes Business Sense board-game training, monthly virtual group check-ins, an activity log for mindset shifts, and individual coaching.
• I designed peer learning that transitioned into a WhatsApp alumnae community, so that the support continued after the program.

Situation

Edge Effect was launching a global Community of Practice for intersectional individuals and organizations working on LGBTQIA+ support across academia and international development. Members spanned the world’s largest time-zone range, from Australia to the US, and the emotional stakes were high. Separately, a major donor, AusAID, needed to understand the lived reality of LGBTQIA+ communities to broaden its policies.

Task

As Global Training and Community Officer, I designed, ran and nurtured the community: a safe space, a high-energy launch, and a direct line between members and the donor.

Action

• I led the strategy, selection criteria, outreach, engagement guidelines and onboarding journeys, so that members could navigate intersectionality from day one.
• I mapped the launch week by week on Asana and InstaGantt, ran a Friday async check-out on Slack, and designed the run-of-programme on SessionLab, so that nothing slipped across time zones.
• I organized and facilitated a virtual fireside chat where LGBTQIA+ members shared experiences of marginalization and epistemic injustice directly with AusAID.
• I personalized survey invitations to each member’s context, and activated a dormant Google Translate integration on the platform at no extra cost.

Situation

WFP’s innovation practitioners in Eastern Africa had never had an in-person space to learn from each other. The social enterprises in its innovation challenges lacked tools to measure their impact, and data on 70+ innovation partners was scattered across different places.

Task

As Impact Measurement and Learning Design Advisor, I owned the learning and knowledge side of WFP’s innovation work: events, capacity building and a single source of truth for partner data.

Action

• I designed WFP’s first-ever in-person innovation workshop, focused on practitioners learning from each other and building advocacy for innovation as a core function.
• I developed “A Practical Guide to Impact Measurement”, a facilitator-led course that walks learners through their Theories of Change, assumptions and key metrics.
• I linked all quantitative and qualitative partner information in one Airtable database, so that every newsletter and donor report could be compiled from a single place.
• I co-led the innovation partners alumni community, connecting alumni with each other and with WFP Partnerships and Innovation for grant proposals and mutual trade.