Rachel Strohm, Co-founder and board chair, Mawazo Institute

Rachel Strohm is the co-founder and chair of the board at the Mawazo Institute, and a social protection consultant.

Mawazo Institute helps East African women launch careers as scholars and policy experts.  She is a social protection consultant with Innovations for Poverty Action and works with governments, and NGOs to design evaluations of social protection programs, and share policy-relevant evidence about what works to reduce poverty in low income countries.

Ms. Strohm has previously worked as a research manager with IPA in the US and Ghana, and consulted on microfinance and social enterprise in the DRC and Rwanda.

She is a PhD candidate in Political Science and holds an MA in political science from Berkeley, an MA in international relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and a BA in geography and French from Dartmouth.

Rachel has recently published articles on social protection in Africa during the COVID 19 pandemic, you can read them below:

-A novel idea: integrating urban and rural safety nets in Africa during the pandemic - (The Conversation)
-Africa’s corona response rests on two things: markets and money transfers - (African Arguments)