Economic Empowerment

Bell Okello is a gender, agricultural and rural development specialist at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Okello provides technical support on gender and agriculture for ICRW’s initiatives across east Africa. He is based in ICRW's East Africa Regional Office in Nairobi, Kenya.

Okello brings 13 years of regional experience in livelihoods and food security, gender analysis and monitoring and evaluation. Most recently, Okello was an independent consultant on rangeland management, natural resource management, livelihoods and food security for a variety of organizations including ETC East Africa. He also has served as a rural development specialist for Mercy Corps and Cooperazione Italiana Nord Sud (CINS).

Aslihan Kes is an economic and gender specialist at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Kes provides technical assistance, management and budgetary support to research partners.

Kes is an economist with six years of experience who conducts research and designs programs related to a variety of topics. Her work at ICRW has included analyzing the costs of maternal mortality on households as well as developing approaches to integrate gender considerations into agricultural projects. Kes also has explored the status of women’s property and inheritance rights globally as well as analyzed how those rights are linked to HIV, AIDS and domestic violence in Uganda and South Africa.

Kes is co-author of “Taking Action: Achieving Gender Equality and Empowering Women,” “Gender and Time Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Seven Priorities, Seven Years to Go: Progress on Achieving Gender Equality.”

Krista Jacobs is an economist at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Jacobs develops capacity building and monitoring and evaluation tools that bring a gender lens to issues related to land, property, agriculture and food security.

Jacobs has more than six years of experience researching the interaction of gender, poverty, health and agricultural development. Jacobs measures the social and economic circumstances of girls and women through surveys and impact analyses. Before joining ICRW in 2008, she was as a fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Global AIDS Program. She also served as a research collaborator at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and as a research manager at a food and nutrition project in Ghana, lead by IFPRI and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Anne Marie Golla is senior economist and evaluation specialist at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Golla leads impact evaluations of projects aimed at economically empowering women and provides technical assistance on economic and evaluation issues.  

Golla has more than 15 years of experience in monitoring and evaluation and in research of women and work, food security, and poverty. Prior to joining ICRW in 2007, Golla conducted research on food security issues in the United States for the Economic Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. Earlier, she oversaw the design and monitoring of economic and rural development projects for CARE International.

Golla has worked on projects in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, and has extensive experience in Russia, Central Asia and the Transcaucasus region. Golla has held teaching positions at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland at College Park.

Jeffrey Edmeades is a social demographer at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this role, Edmeades manages a variety of projects in which he provides technical assistance to partners, designs and conducts program evaluations and executes data analysis. His research primarily focuses on the interaction between the development process and demographic behavior, including fertility, contraceptive use and migration as well as household decision-making processes and the role gender norms play in shaping demographic outcomes.

Edmeades, who joined ICRW in 2006, brings years of experience in studying the effects of rural poverty, gender inequality and reproductive health patterns in the developing world. He also has published a number of peer-reviewed papers that address research methodology and the determinants of reproductive behavior and intimate partner violence, among other topics. His work has appeared in academic publications such as Demography, Social Science and Medicine, Studies in Family Planning and the Journal of Mixed Method Research.

Edmeades has extensive international experience in a number of countries including Canada, Mexico, Ghana, Thailand, England, Ethiopia and New Zealand.