Strategist · Operator · Builder
I advise executives on practical AI strategy. I also lead one of Peace Corps’ largest posts in Africa. The combination is rarer than it should be.
Twenty years of operations and programming leadership across three continents, including a pandemic evacuation and disaster management during a coup attempt, plus a working fluency in the AI tools now changing how organizations run.
Where I sit
Strategy is my training: Fortune 500 health companies at PwC, multi-country TB access portfolios at CHAI, and the country programs I shape today. Since 2012 I have guided large organizations through technology shifts, eHealth to mobile to AI. I have studied the AI environment intensively, through coursework from IBM, Harvard, McKinsey, and Anthropic among others, and I build working apps with these tools to support my own operations.
Twenty years running complex, high-stakes operations. Today that means a $5M portfolio, 57 staff across five provincial offices, and 70 Volunteers in remote Zambian communities. I have led teams through a coup attempt, civil unrest, and a pandemic evacuation. Risk is not theoretical to me.
I start things I believe should exist. I founded and still run Beyond Busy Living, a digital platform helping women design intentional lives beyond busyness. I co-founded the Alliance for Diaspora Empowerment, which connects service work across the African Diaspora; today I advise it strictly in a personal capacity, kept fully separate from my Peace Corps role. And in Sierra Leone I taught entrepreneurship and self-worth with the DREAM Girls program at the Aberdeen Women’s Centre, because direct service is what keeps a Country Director close to the ground.
On the ground
Career Atlas
Start with Zambia. That is where it began, and where it leads. Select any country to open its chapter.
Zambia, the full circle Chapters TB access portfolio
What I take on
I help leaders figure out where AI genuinely saves time, where it introduces real risk, and how to adopt it without theater. My advice comes from daily practice with the tools and from running the kind of organization that has to live with the consequences.
Senior operating roles, country or regional director level and above, with international NGOs, foundations, multilaterals, and corporate social impact teams. I am at my best where the stakes are high and the context is complicated.
An operator’s eye and a strategist’s mind in the room: someone who has managed budgets, security incidents, and ministry relationships, and who asks the questions that only come from a consultant’s training and from having done the work.
Sessions on leading through complexity, practical AI adoption, emotional intelligence, communication, and team building. Expect practical, tried-and-tested approaches, not frameworks for their own sake. I also design retreats that help teams build strategy from the ground up, through connection first; I have led them for my own teams in Sierra Leone and Zambia.
Experience
One of Peace Corps’ largest posts in Africa: a ~$5M annual portfolio including $2M+ under PEPFAR, the U.S. global HIV/AIDS initiative, with 57 staff across five provincial offices and ~70 Volunteers. I represent Peace Corps with Zambian government ministries, U.S. Embassy leadership, CDC, and global implementing partners, and I build partnerships with other organizations’ leaders that have opened new service opportunities for Volunteers.
~44 staff and ~30 Volunteers across five regions. Led emergency response during the November 2023 attempted coup d’état, running communications by satellite phone after national networks went dark, and during the August 2022 civil unrest. Established and signed MOUs with the Ministries of Education and Health, the agreements that allow districts, schools, and clinics across Sierra Leone to welcome Volunteers as teachers and community health workers.
Oversight of health and HIV programming across 22 countries under PEPFAR. Deputy principal delegate in its annual country-level planning process.
~20 staff and ~120 Volunteers. Co-led crisis coordination during COVID-19, including the safe evacuation of 700+ Volunteers transiting through Addis Ababa within 24 hours on chartered planes. Afterward, created the Post Staff Support Groups, a virtual model for keeping national staff connected and innovating through the shutdown, which Peace Corps expanded worldwide.
TB market-access work across three global workstreams funded by DFID (the U.K.’s development agency), Unitaid, and the Gates Foundation. Led the four-country study (India, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia) that turned ~70 expert interviews into investment guidance for the Gates Foundation on next-generation TB tools; held program-management responsibility for CHAI’s ~$10M portion of IMPAACT4TB, a $59M Unitaid-funded, 12-country initiative to make short-course TB prevention affordable; and owned value-for-money reporting on CHAI’s flagship DFID market-shaping program, rated A+ by the U.K. government. I authored the study framework the four country reports were built on, built and staffed CHAI’s project team, ran monthly financials across all three grants, and personally led the government-facing engagement with Kenya’s national TB program.
Strategy, governance, and digital transformation for Fortune 500 payers, providers, pharma, and diagnostics. On a $6M health insurance exchange implementation, I managed a team responsible for deliverables central to operational readiness and supported the management of a 50-person client team across eleven program areas. I also helped design eHealth and mobile strategies for major health systems and insurers, and contributed to governance and reorganization work for an intergovernmental organization.
Where it started. Led a $500K HIV counseling and testing program, trained ~500 caregivers and counselors across all nine provinces, and helped test more than 10,000 people in a year, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Publications
Beyond the resume
In 2005 I moved into a rural Zambian village as a Peace Corps Volunteer. What I remember most is the generosity of the people who had the least: doors opened, meals shared, new ideas tried. Twenty years later I returned to lead the entire program. I do not know a cleaner way to say what service means to me than that circle.
Outside the day job, I build. Beyond Busy Living grew out of watching accomplished women, myself included, mistake busyness for a life. The Alliance for Diaspora Empowerment came from a conviction that service work across the African Diaspora is stronger connected than scattered. I still run Beyond Busy Living outside the workday; my advisory role with the Alliance is personal, and kept fully separate from my Peace Corps work. They are what I do with what I have learned.
Get in touch
Shaping a strategy, weighing an AI decision, filling a senior role, or building something that needs an operator’s judgment? I would like to hear from you.