Country Experience: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Vietnam.
Helen is a social development and MEAL expert, with extensive experience across a broad range of civil society projects and programmes.
While working for Plan UK, Helen produced a case study on civil society’s role in developing a National Social Protection Policy for Malawi. Within Uganda, Helen completed two assignments on early childhood development, most recently looking at efforts to make Early Childhood Care and Development interventions gender transformative.
For several years, Helen played a lead role in the Stars Foundation Impact Awards, which included interviewing and short listing CSO candidates across South-East Asia and then conducting organisational assessment visits to short-listed CSOs. In 2017, Helen facilitated a Monitoring and Evaluation workshop in Vietnam for 16 impact awardees from Asia. As Child and Youth adviser with Department for International Development (DFID), she helped set up the DFID/CSO Children and Youth Network and project-managed the DFID-funded ‘Youth Participation Guide’.Since 2009 Helen has worked on the assessment of DFID/FCDO funding windows, assessing concept notes, proposals and Annual Reports.
Helen has carried out a number of participatory and inclusive evaluations and assessments, utilising methods and tools to enable a wide range of voices and perspectives to be included, with a focus on lessons learned to inform future planning. This includes country strategy assessments for Plan Nepal and Plan Timor-Leste, mid-term and final evaluations for UOB-Optimus Foundation’s partnership in Liberia, a global thematic review of Plan International’s early childhood development work, and an independent evaluation of ‘Safer Cities for Girls’ for Plan Germany.
In 2020-21 Helen was part of a team that worked on the ICAI review of DFID/FCDO support to youth employment in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on bringing the voice of young people into the review and on gender and social inclusion.
Helen has a BSc in Economics from City University, and an MSc from the University of Bath in Development Studies.