“Emma is fantastic to work with! She is a great listener, who takes the time to understand and then offers wise, empathetic and pragmatic advice. Her questions and suggestions have helped me to find a more helpful perspective on challenges I’m facing. The review she conducted for Sense International was thorough, with strong attention to detail, informed by an excellent understanding of the context. I am hoping to engage her for another piece of programme work soon.”
“The team [from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia] appreciated the fact that Emma is aware of the challenges that we are experiencing [with assessing development impact] and this connected us to her a lot. The wisdom and the trigger questions that Emma kept asking helped us rethink on how we carry out some of our activities more strategically to capture the impact therein.”
“The ten year period of Emma’s association with AVI in Africa has been a remarkable period within which AVI has established offices in East and Southern Africa. Emma has played an invaluable role and AVI is the richer for her contributions. Her advice to Australian missions and the AVI executive has always been considered, grounded in her own experiences of African situations and guided by a refined understanding of duty of care as well as strategic imperatives.”
“I’ve known Emma for many years and she has conducted several assignments for DFID Malawi. She is organised, focused, efficient and highly competent. She has an excellent rapport with people at all levels and strong communication skills, both written and verbal. I highly recommend Emma for any assignment or endeavour that she may seek to pursue. She will absolutely bring a lot of added value to the task and to your organisation.”
“I had the privilege of working with Emma between 2011 and 2015. Her understanding and appreciation of local structures and operating norms as well as mastery of local customs enabled her to develop strong relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, including heads of government departments. The key thing I learnt from Emma is being humble irrespective of who you are engaging with.”
“Emma’s professionalism, coupled with her ability to understand the needs of NGOs and her unique approach to depicting the issues affecting Africa’s development, highlighted the issues of old carers in Mozambique in a positive and inspirational way. Emma’s work was a huge success and we used her images and stories on BBC Online as well as in our advocacy materials. Our staff in Mozambique also benefited from working with Emma and developed a better understanding of development impact.”
“Before Emma’s training, many programme staff didn’t see any relevance of communications to the overall goals and objectives of ActionAid. Emma helped them recognise the value that communications adds to their core work. They realised the need to document the impact of their work and share stories of change with funding partners as well as the general public. As a result, ActionAid Malawi marketed itself to the global family and showcased its impact to funders. Potential donors and other country programmes began visiting to learn from Malawi.”
