Team

Jacky Knowles is an independent public nutritionist with over 20 years international experience, primarily in micronutrient programmes. She has experience supporting all areas of national programmes to achieve optimal micronutrient status, with a focus on generating and using data for evidence-based programming and facilitation of public-private-civic partnerships to design and implement sustainable food fortification interventions. Jacky also has experience in the development and application of participatory training methods to support national implementation of core nutrition interventions through the health service.

Jacky has extensive experience living and working in South East Asia and the Pacific. She has also worked in Central America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, West and North Africa, and South Asia. Previous organisational affiliations include Khon Kaen University, Thailand; UNICEF (various country and regional offices); the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, GAIN, Nutrition International, The Iodine Global Network, and the consultancy company Public Nutrition Solutions Ltd.

Jacky has a Ph.D. in Nutritional Biochemistry and Malaria, is a native English speaker with fluency in Thai and knowledge of spoken and written Lao.

Lola Gostelow is an independent humanitarian consultant with over 25 years experience in the aid sector. Originally trained and working as a nutritionist and food security analyst, she has also engaged more broadly in humanitarian response and humanitarian policy concerns.

Lola is an Accredited Member and an Associate of the Partnership Brokers Association (PBA), working to support the quality of inter-agency collaborations so as to maximize their impact and effectiveness. Her demonstrable facilitation and training skills have been applied in her nutrition as well as brokering work.

Lola has led strategic planning exercises in sector (nutrition and food security) and thematic areas (humanitarian policy). She has supported the strategic positioning of organisations, at board and CEO levels, and chaired two major inter-agency initiatives (The Sphere Project and the Start Network).

Lola teaches regularly at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on humanitarian policy.

Over the past 16 years Phil McKinney has gained a wide experience with a number of NGOs and UN agencies (UNICEF, WFP and FAO).  Originating from Belfast, Ireland, his main working language is English.  Phil McKinney’s holds a MSc (Med Sci) Public Health Nutrition and his primary expertise is in food and nutrition security information systems and assessments.  This expertise extends to the development of technical guidance and indicators, evaluating, appraising, and design of national level nutrition and food security surveillance systems as well as global normative guidance, food and nutrition security assessments (national and subnational), as well as appraisal of nutritional programming and using surveillance data for policy papers.  He is also skilled in the use and development of various tools for use in measuring nutritional status and dietary assessment, as well as food security and market price analysis tools.

The majority of this work has been done in cooperation with national government with the view to provide sustainable solutions and in building capacity.  Phil McKinney work has covered a wide geographical scope, that encompasses a multitude of contexts and technical requirements.  This ranges from the predominately slow onset shocks of the Horn and Southern Africa as well as Central Asia, the mass population movements seen in the MENA region, to sudden onset disasters experienced in South East Asia, and areas of conflict/post-conflict in Central and West Africa.

He also provides additional perspectives with his work as a photographer.

Kate Godden is a Principal Nutrition expert with more than 25 years’ experience of working in the development and humanitarian sectors.   She has noteworthy academic experience, 10 years +, lecturing at MSc level giving leadership on global nutrition programming, food security, nutrition in emergencies modules.  She also has significant experience in programme evaluation.

Kate has worked in more than 20 countries with varied stakeholders – government, donor, NGO – across the nutrition arena covering programme planning, policy, governance and evaluation.   She is experienced within the SUN movement promoting and using a multi-sector approach to policy and programming to enable holistic guidance and recommendations.

Kate originally trained at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and continues to contribute to distance learning and module development there.  She is also an accredited public health nutritionist with the Association for Nutrition and a qualified Dietitian.

Currently Kate is working in the UK, with Bags of Taste, tackling food poverty at grass roots and is supporting the Society of Apothecaries’ faculty of Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine.

Brenda Akwanyi has been working in the field of International Public Health and Nutrition for 17 years in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa region, South East Asia, and the Caribbean with various international non-governmental agencies as well as UNICEF. Her thematic areas of expertise include country and regional level technical leadership and quality oversight in nutrition programming Programme design, implementation and evaluation as well as scale-up of high impact nutrition interventions and multi stakeholder nutrition coordination) and she has been embedded technical assistance in the Ministries of Health. Since 2015 she has been an independent consultant focusing on IFAD supported programs within Ministry of rural development and Ministry of fisheries in Mozambique to mainstream nutrition within their portfolio (markets linkages, agriculture values chains and small-scale fisheries and aquaculture) and on MQSUN+ and UNICEF global assignments. Brenda has a master’s in Public Health Nutrition from Leeds Metropolitan University, she speaks Swahili, English, French and currently learning Portuguese.

Anne-Marie has twenty years’ experience in nutrition and development and has worked extensively in Asia and Africa for NGOs, International Organisations and Academia. She works on research, evaluation, design, documentation and capacity building related to nutrition and agriculture programmes and policies.

Her recent consultancies focus on the interface between agriculture and nutrition and she is passionate about sustainable solutions for both. She has strong research and evaluation skills and has carried out special research projects linking nutrition to agriculture and livelihoods. She uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods and co-developed a new method for surveying nomadic pastoralists.

Recent work includes a case study of the Nutrition impact of the Himalayan Permaculture Centre’s work in Nepal, an evaluation of the FAO’s ‘Strategic Objective 1’ (contribute to the elimination of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition), nutrition analysis of a large agriculture programme in Ethiopia, Nutrition-Sensitive Conservation Agriculture in Zambia, operational factors in Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture programming in Zimbabwe, a policy analysis in Malawi on nutrition policy and an analysis of caring practices amongst nomadic pastoralists in Ethiopia.

Anne-Marie has worked as a nutrition advisor for both Save the Children and Concern Worldwide. She has undertaken academic research at the Universities of London, Bristol, Leeds and Cornell on projects related to Nutrition. She teaches topics related to Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition on ad hoc courses and in academia.

Anne-Marie has a Master’s degree in Nutrition from the University of London and a PhD in International Nutrition with Soil Science and Epidemiology from Cornell University, USA.

Website: https://annemariebmayer.wordpress.com/

Susana has over 15 years of experience in the fields of nutrition in emergencies, food security & resilience programming and Human Rights. Her geographical expertise has been in Central/South America, The Caribbean and South East Asia, along with international agencies and U.N system.

She started her public career in the Unicef Regional Office for LAC in 2004 and joined later the Nutrition Institute for Central America and Panama -INCAP- for the monitoring of several food security and nutrition programs in the region. In the last years she has succeeded in organisations such as Oxfam Great Britain and Action Against Hunger, providing global assistance to UN agencies, governments and NGOs for the development of humanitarian programs, the design of national plans and strategies, the analysis of programs, as well as leading formal and informal capacity building initiatives on her areas of expertise.

She is a certified practitioner in humanitarian affairs, has a master’s degree in Food Security, a fellowship in infant feeding and paediatric nutrition and a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition. Her qualifications and updates include topics such as IASC Nutrition Cluster Coordination, the HEA approach to Food Security Assessments, the Outcome Mapping approach for planning & evaluation and the verification of facts, documentation and monitoring on Human Rights.

Susana is a global awarded Human Rights defender in the field of Right to Food and an associate member of international technical resource group(s), including NutritionWorks. Susana is currently the lead adviser for Caritas Internationalis humanitarian response in Venezuela.

NutritionWorks is honoured and proud that our Associate Susana Raffalli has been named as one of the BBC 100 women of 2020. Congratulations to Susana for her incredible contribution to humanitarian relief.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55042935

Emily Mates is an experienced public health nutritionist, working for the last 19 years across humanitarian and development policy, strategy and programming, mostly in Africa. She has a MSc in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has broad-ranging experience of health service delivery and systems; including nutrition, health care management and community programming initiatives. She was extensively involved with the Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) approach since the first pilot in Ethiopia in 2000 and its subsequent transition from small INGO programmes to national level scale-up and integration into routine health services. More recently Emily has been leading an ‘interest group’ for those working in adolescent nutrition, including academics, researchers and practitioners.

Emily works part time as a Technical Director for Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN) where she leads a number of projects and part time as a consultant for a number of different partners; Donors, the UN and INGOs. She has a particular interest in providing technical support, analysis, policy and strategy development for partners and in supporting governments to develop strategies and policies for longer-term solutions to the problems of malnutrition.

Anne Bush has more than 20 years professional experience in the field of public health and nutrition both at global level and in a wide range of countries including Kenya, Somalia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Indonesia and the UK. She has a Masters in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a first degree in Dietetics. Over her career, Anne has developed a broad range of skills and experience across both humanitarian and development contexts. She has significant experience in policy and strategic development, programme design, development of technical guidance and tools, monitoring and evaluation, quality assurance and research. She has provided technical assistance to donors, governments, UN agencies and NGOs. Specific areas of interest include management of acute malnutrition, multisectoral approach to addressing malnutrition, particularly the integration of nutrition and health through system strengthening, and community-based approaches.

Mary Corbett has worked in the humanitarian sector for the last 25 years. She has considerable experience in both emergency and development programming initially working in Somalia during the 92-93 crisis. Early in her career she has worked with GOAL, Oxfam and Concern Worldwide in a variety of nutrition and health programmes; developing proposals and managing programmes. She worked in the emergency department with Oxfam UK and the role included various deployments for initial emergency assessments followed on with developing programmes in some of the following countries; Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Bosnia and Pakistan.

Mary was then recruited by Concern Worldwide as the Nutrition Adviser and the role included technical support to programmes and developing policy at head office level. Her background initially was as a registered nurse, which was followed on with a course in Tropical Medicine at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and later a MSc in Nutrition & Metabolism at Aberdeen University. Between 2003 & 2013 she has worked as an independent consultant with numerous NGOs, UN agencies and donors. Organizations and UN agencies supported include ACF, British Red Cross, Save the Children, Concern Worldwide, Trocaire, UNHCR, WFP and UNICEF and donors including DFID. Her work includes numerous programme evaluations, development of technical material including national nutrition guidelines in a number of African countries, training and mentoring and conducting a number of studies.

She had a 3-year draw-down consultancy with Irish Aid giving technical support in Food Security and Nutrition. This role involved a number of country support visits, attending meetings and mapping nutrition within the organization.

She has been actively involved in the development of the approach “Community Management of Acute Malnutrition” with a specific focus on management of acute malnutrition in small children (less than 6mths). Over the last five years Mary has been working as a Nutrition Adviser on a part-time basis with Self Help Africa (Irish NGO) with a focus on integrating nutrition within agriculture and enterprise programmes to support the reduction of chronic malnutrition in countries where there is a high burden of stunting in young children. She is also currently involved in teaching in several academic institutions in Ireland. Mary has been an associate with NutirtionWorks over a number of years. She has had a number of publications with the Emergency Nutrition Network’s (ENN’s) publication “Field Exchange”.