Joanna Knight provides consultancy services for the humanitarian and development sector specialising in four core areas:

Formerly the Head of Institutional Funding at ActionAid International Secretariat providing strategic leadership and guidance to member countries on institutional funding, contract management and system and policy development. She has a significant track record working in complex humanitarian settings (such as South Sudan and Central African Republic), managing large multi-country programmes or portfolios on public health, social accountability and women’s rights taking a human-rights based approach. Previous clients include ActionAid, Global Witness, British Asian Trust, European Climate Fund, LearnJam and Trócaire.

Zaira Drammis is an independent consultant with more than 20 years’ experience. She is an expert in strategy, monitoring, evaluation, organisational learning and change. Zaira provides services to organisations ranging from NGOs and government to funders. She was Head of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning for ActionAid International and Amnesty International – where she also worked as a campaigner and advisor. Zaira has consulted for UN Women, the Kering Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the World Animal Protection, as well as Amnesty and ActionAid. She served on the Advisory Board of Acid Survivors Trust International, and is currently a research fellow at the CECAN Initiative.

Zaira is passionate about supporting organisations to achieve change. She helps organisations to develop monitoring and evaluation systems, capacity, and culture. She evaluates funders strategies, advocacy and influencing initiatives, and organisational capacity. Zaira is also a trainer and facilitator, helping organisations to develop strategies and plans.

She is an ‘out of the box’ consultant. She combines communication and campaigning skills with solid technical monitoring and evaluation knowledge.

Annie Hoban is an independent consultant currently based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She has significant experience in organisational effectiveness, systems and process development and programme management, learning and evaluation in both the humanitarian and development sectors. Previously, Annie was Head of Humanitarian Funding at ActionAid UK where she oversaw emergency response and resilience funding from DFID, ECHO and the DEC, including proposal development, contract management and donor relations. Her background includes managing communication for development programs and and community-led resilience building in East Africa.

As a consultant since 2018, Annie has worked on proposal development, capacity building and monitoring and evaluation assignments. These include facilitating the revision of the SHAPE capacity assessment framework to improve gender and social inclusion, conducting a capacity support and review visit to Danida-supported partners in Gaza, writing a publication on young people in humanitarian action for ActionAid, developing a humanitarian Standard Operating Procedure for Trócaire HQ, delivering a monitoring and evaluation contract for a Comic Relief funded malaria project in Sierra Leone, developing an EU proposal on women’s value-chain participation for Trócaire in Sierra Leone, EU SGBV grant set up for AdvocAid Sierra Leone, and a capacity assessment of SEND Sierra Leone.

Annie has a Master Degree in Global Politics from LSE, a professional qualification in research methods completed at the Centre for Financial Management Studies, University of London. She is trained on Outcome Mapping and qualified in PMD-Pro Project Management for Development. She is passionate about women’s rights and leadership and transformational community-led development.

Riccardo D’Emidio is a freelance consultant supporting INGOs and International Development Agencies with the development and roll out of communication and influencing strategies and frameworks, Communication for Development (C4D) initiatives and qualitative research. After pursuing his MA at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Governance and Development he worked for a range of international organisations such as Oxfam, UNCDF, International Service and Avaaz, delivering cutting edge communication, advocacy, C4D and campaigning. Much of his work experience has been in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific and West Africa.

Riccardo currently is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex, at the Centre for the Study of Corruption housed in the Department of Politics. His research focuses on corruption and informality, local constructions of integrity and corruption, and social norms as determinants of behaviour. He speaks fluently Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and English and has a significant track record of developing and delivering data and research driven national and regional communication and influencing initiatives on a range of issues such as (anti-)corruption, governance, citizen empowerment and Hiv/Aids. He currently collaborates as Key Expert for Civic Education in the Accountability, Rule of Law and Anti-corruption Programme.