Our team
Leadership and management team
Guy Jobbins, SPARC Executive Director
Guy has over 25 years’ experience working on issues of climate resilience, natural resources, and rural livelihoods in management, research, and technical assistance roles. Recent work has included leading an evaluation of the UK’s official development assistance to agriculture, advising FCDO country offices on mainstreaming climate action in development programmes, and supporting Jordanian and Lebanese government ministries in developing their drought risk management capabilities. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow in Water Policy at ODI, Senior Programme Officer with IDRC’s Climate Change Adaptation in Africa Programme, and spent several years working in Egypt’s Environmental Affairs Agency and national park service.
Mauricio Vazquez, Research Lead
Mauricio is the Head of Strategic Partnerships for the ODI Global Risks and Resilience programme, where he designs and works across different multi-stakeholder initiatives to build resilience and drive sustainable change in complex settings. Before SPARC, Mauricio served as the Knowledge Manager of the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) knowledge and policy hub at ODI.
Rupsha Banerjee, Consortium Management Committee
Rupsha R. Banerjee is a Senior Scientist at ILRI with over 15 years’ experience working in Asia and Africa, in evidence-based research to stimulate innovation for development, recognise institutional needs and designs for emerging markets and assess their influence in policy, agricultural transformation and decision making in households and livelihoods. She currently leads an agenda for scaling-out drought risk financing index insurance solutions for livestock, including use of digital information for service delivery in the drylands of the Horn of Africa.
Carmen Jaquez, Consortium Management Committee
Carmen is a livelihood and market systems expert at Mercy Corps who specialises in dairy and livestock economies in pastoralist, agro-pastoralist and peri-urban production systems and marketsheds. She has worked in livestock and agriculture systems (production, input and output markets, value-addition) across East, Southern and West Africa since 1995. Her work focuses on the nexus of human economic development and well-being, livestock production and ecosystem health.
Rebecca Nadin, Risk and Resilience Adviser
Rebecca is the Director of the ODI Global Risks and Resilience programme. Rebecca leads a multi-disciplinary team of analysts to pioneer policy-driven research working on the nexus between new and emerging risks. She specialises in climate, political and geopolitical risk assessment to reduce vulnerability, build resilience and drive transformative and sustainable change.
Emily Workman, Programme Manager
Emily has 10 years of experience working in project management, project development and operations for a range of donor-funded projects, most recently in South Sudan with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a Field Coordinator on a large-scale World Bank-funded community resilience and local governance project. She has previously also worked on education, gender equality, social inclusion research and technology-related projects, based in Malawi and South Sudan. She now works with Cowater.
Pauline Njiraini, Fund Manager, Cowater, Nairobi, Kenya
Pauline is a senior grants management specialist with over ten years of experience leading and overseeing the implementation of the grants management cycle for various donor funded programmes. Before joining SPARC, Pauline was the Senior Grants Specialist for the USAID-funded Kenya Youth Employment and Skills Programme.
Research team
Fiona currently holds a position jointly funded by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the International Land Coalition (ILC), leading the Rangelands Initiative for the International Land Coalition. In this position, she works with government stakeholders to enable policy for rangelands and pastoralism, as well as providing technical advice on rangelands initiatives in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Her research explores building resilience and adaptation to environmental change; securing access to and sustainably utilising land and resources; and reducing human insecurities, vulnerabilities and inequities.
Simon Levine, ODI
Simon specialises in livelihoods and vulnerability analysis, land rights, and in early response in humanitarian crises. Before joining ODI, he spent many years working for NGOs in Mozambique, Cambodia, Tanzania and Burundi, and as a consultant based in Uganda for nine years.
Sarah is a Research Associate in the Global Risks and Resilience programme at ODI. She has over 19 years’ experience working at the intersection of climate, security and development in fragile and conflict-affected settings, currently with a focus on the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. Under SPARC she is leading research and learning programmes around transboundary climate, mitigation and adaptation risks as well as the links between climate, fragility and conflict.
Chloe is a management consultant with over 15 years of experience in international development research, policy and practice, spent mostly in fragile and conflict-affected areas of the Horn of Africa. In addition to SPARC, she is currently a market system development advisor for Sida programs in Ethiopia and Kenya and a part-time Masters student in innovation. Chloe is excited to be working with the SPARC team on the Innovation Research Facility and its efforts identify, amplify and scale innovation in the drylands in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders.
Steve has been researching agricultural and rural development in Africa and Latin America since 1972. His work focuses on rural markets - particularly for smallholders in Africa, the operation of rural labour markets, the rural non-farm economy and the application of market analysis to crises of food insecurity. His work has formed the basis for policy recommendations on pro- poor market development.
Katharine is a climate change specialist with more than 20 years of experience working in gender analysis and research on vulnerability, adaptation, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), and climate services. She is active in the academic environment, currently holding a visiting Associate Professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and acting as an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports and Special Report on Climate Change and Land.