About
Bristol-based. PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, working full time at a UK INGO, building an independent advisory practice on the side.
Philosophy
Too much of what gets called localisation is administrative relocation dressed up as empowerment: the reporting burden moves south, the funding rules stay exactly where they were, and the people doing the actual work absorb the risk without ever holding the budget or the veto.
Genuine ownership looks different. It means a local partner can set the agenda rather than only deliver against someone else's logframe. It means they can say no to a donor's terms and the relationship survives it. My research and my field work both start from that distinction, and I don't call something local ownership unless the power actually moved with it, not the paperwork alone.
At the same time, I don't treat local actors as passive until a donor grants them power. My doctoral research looks closely at how people find real agency inside rigid systems: adapting imported components, reinterpreting a project's stated goals, quietly building the workaround that keeps a clinic running when the official process can't. I call this harnessing constraint, and it's the other half of the picture. Good localisation design has to build on that existing agency rather than design around it as if it isn't there.
Research
My PhD examines the politics of localisation in Sub-Saharan Africa, focused on assistive technology and prosthetics and orthotics networks across East and West Africa. Rather than treating localisation as an ethical promise or a donor checklist, I look at how it functions as governance in practice: everyday administrative tasks, funding rules and reporting routines that shape who holds real decision-making power, regardless of what the strategy document says.
The research traces this across four levels, from global donors and multilateral agencies, through intermediary NGOs and research hubs, down to frontline clinics and the technicians and patients navigating them day to day. I bridge this with field experience across The Gambia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
Terms I use
Full definitions on the glossary.
Building On
Reading & Listening
Field Note
A new prosthetics and orthotics clinic in Bansang, The Gambia, opened with proper ramps and wide doors, exactly what accessible design guidance asks for. The path leading to it was steep, rocky and unpaved. The hospital CEO explained that the funding covered the building itself; the ramps and the clinic were in scope, the path wasn't.
"It wasn't said defensively. It was just a fact."
The regional governor's office was sympathetic but realistic: the most likely route to a funded path ran through the British High Commission, the UN, or the EU lobbying central government to release money, to put concrete on a path. That's what governance-in-practice looks like on the ground: not a failure of goodwill, but a question of who gets to decide what counts as in scope.
Once prosthetic components are flagged as clinically expired, British taxpayers pay roughly £369 per tonne to dispose of medical-grade titanium and carbon fibre. Functional hardware becomes waste because the regulatory script says so. Meanwhile a clinician in a Sub-Saharan workshop is scraping together $1,000 to $3,000 for whatever components they can get hold of.
A pilot in The Gambia ran short of specialised silicone liners. Through the formal route that means a grant amendment, justification forms and a stalled timeline. Instead I phoned a supplier chief executive I had met once at a conference two years earlier. He committed the liners inside a minute, and added a quarter more as a buffer. That call appears in no process document anywhere.
Disposal and component figures from a guest lecture at the University of Southampton, March 2026.
Credentials
Co-manage a multi-year, EU co-financed programme in The Gambia, and lead multi-country transitions across Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, moving regional grassroots networks from grant dependency to self-sustaining operating models.
Freelance consultancy helping NGOs evaluate their organisational structures and build effective practitioner-researcher partnerships.
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), examining power dynamics, capital flows and the politics of localisation.
Contributor partnering with universities, health ministries and NGOs to build the evidence base for prosthetics and orthotics services in low-resource settings.
Thesis on how small-scale NGOs maximise structural impact through cross-sector partnership design in Uganda.
Speaking & Public Engagement
Running prosthetics clinics in low-resource settings, and how clinical decisions get shaped by structures well upstream of the clinic.
Recorded presentation, part of a wider series.
On what holds practitioner-researcher partnerships together, and where they usually stall.
Side session at the international trade show and world congress. The case for building prosthetics capacity across the sector internationally, rather than concentrating investment at the engineering high end.
Occasional talks in UK schools on international development and disability.
Independence
A Transition Exposure Review does not write the terms of reference for any work that follows it. Where a follow-on piece would be competitively procured, I will say so and declare prior involvement. Review findings are yours to circulate internally or publish.
I hold a salaried role at a UK INGO. Any engagement arising from that organisation's relationships is declared before a proposal is written.
Research published on this site uses organisations' own public documents. Every organisation named in a study is sent its entry and given four weeks to correct the record before publication.