Meet the policy team

Graham Gordon, Head of Public Policy

Graham ensures our advocacy strategies effectively target key decision-makers, manages the Policy Team and contributes to the management of the Advocacy Department. He also maintains our commitment to evidence-based policy messages, represents us to decision-makers and the media on cross-cutting policy issues, works with staff in BOAG agencies to support a co-ordinated approach on issues impacting development.

Anne Lindsay, Lead Analyst, Private Sector

Anne heads up CAFOD's work on the private sector. She leads on the role of business in development and the issue of business and human rights. Her work also includes looking at global supply chains, including the electronics industry, and she represents CAFOD within the Ethical Trading Initiative. As part of CAFOD's commitment to Publish What You Pay, Anne is working on country by country reporting requirements for businesses and following the progress of Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Focus countries for her research include Timor Leste, Mexico and Peru.

Beck Wallace, Lead Analyst, Extractives and Corruption

Beck focuses on the positive and negative contributions of mining to development and state partnerships with the private sector. Complementing Anne’s work on transparency by extractives companies, Beck advocates for decision-makers to enact and implement legislation that prevents companies from fuelling corruption.

Neva Frecheville, Lead Analyst on Post-MDGs and Aid

Neva heads up CAFOD’s work on the issue of what should come after the Millennium Development Goals, a global framework for development which ends in 2015. Her work includes acting as co-chair of the Beyond 2015, an ever-growing global civil society campaign bringing together over 500 organisations from over 90 countries – and leading on CAFOD’s strategy to ensure that people living in poverty have a meaningful voice in the debate. She also holds a watching brief on efforts to improve the quality and impact of aid, and ensure the UK government delivers on its promises.

Bernadette Fischler, Policy Analyst on Post-MDGs

Bernadette works with the post-2015 team in CAFOD and the Beyond 2015 campaign to ensure that the priorities and perspectives of people living in poverty are taken into account by the UN and governments, when designing the new post-2015 development framework. Her policy and advocacy work focus on post-MDG strategies to end poverty while ensuring a sustainable environment.

Andrea Rigon, Research Coordinator (Compass 2015 & Participate)

Andrea coordinates the Compass 2015, a participatory research project to include the perspectives of those living in poverty or who are from marginal, vulnerable or excluded groups into the post-MDGs process. He is also working on the advocacy of Participate, a multi-agency global initiative co-convened by the Institute of Development Studies and Beyond 2015. This initiative will provide high quality evidence on the reality of poverty at ground level.

Christina Weller, Lead Economic Analyst

Christina heads up CAFOD's work on key economic policy issues and provides support on economic research and analysis. Following work on the impact of the global economic crisis in developing countries, she is currently carrying out research on how we can rebuild economies to better serve objectives of poverty eradication and sustainable development.

Sarah Montgomery, Economic Justice Policy Analyst

Sarah joins CAFOD’s economic justice team after working on local economic development in South Africa. She is currently researching how best to support smallholder agriculture in order to contribute to food security and investigating what “greening” the economy means for poor men and women.

Sarah Wykes, Environment and Climate Change Analyst

For CAFOD, climate change is a cross-cutting issue that should be seen through the wider lens of how global and local environmental threats undermine poverty reduction and exacerbate social exclusion. CAFOD is currently advocating for leadership from the UK to tackle climate change through a legally binding and ambitious deal by 2015 to cut carbon emissions and by providing sufficient and timely resources to help poorer countries adapt and build low carbon, socially inclusive development paths. The current focus of Sarah’s work is on sustainable energy access for the poor and preventing  dirty energy investments in Africa that  threaten local communities’ livelihoods.

Anne Street, Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor

Anne covers policy issues relating to the international humanitarian system, including response to sudden onset emergencies as well as peace and conflict related policy work. Her focus is the humanitarian reform agenda (financing, coordination and leadership) conflict sensitivity, protection in humanitarian contexts, humanitarian principles and peace building. She also undertakes analysis and policy and advocacy work on individual countries experiencing humanitarian emergencies.

Gweneth Barry, International Advocacy Manager

Gwen manages the support the policy team provides to CAFOD’s partners and programmes to help them influence policy and practice effectively and ensure they can make the most of UK opportunities to do this. This involves overseeing the advocacy accompaniment work and specific advocacy on country specific issues in the UK. She is also working on approaches to help partners demonstrate impact in advocacy. A theme that has emerged across CAFOD’s country programmes is a trend towards closing political space for civil society. Gwen is leading policy work in this area.  

Sarah Barnett, Advocacy Accompanier

Sarah supports partners involved in advocacy work, and working alongside them in the field collecting evidence to influence or challenge decision makers. Her work is focused on five priority countries: - DR Congo, Sri Lanka and Cambodia helping them think through the way they influence to ensure change.

Kezia Lavan, Advocacy Accompanier

Kezia supports CAFOD’s partners and programme teams with their advocacy work, including in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Brazil, on issues such as economic justice, children’s rights, housing justice and climate change. By supporting partners to reflect on their approaches, introducing new methodologies, and sharing learning from other parts of the world, Kezia works to empower partners to enable them to bring about the changes they want to make.

Read more from the Policy Team on our blog and twitter site:
cafodpolicy.wordpress.com
@CAFODwire