Luz Saavedra
I am a graduate in Political Sciences (AUB, Barcelona), with a diploma in International Affairs (Science Po, Paris) and a masters in International and Comparative Law (SOAS, London). For more than 20 years I have worked as both researcher and humanitarian/emergency manager, with experience in programme coordination, management of teams, ethical research, policy and advocacy development, monitoring, evaluation, learning and accountability. Combining both roles in a sustained way adds value to my work both as a team manager and as a humanitarian researcher. I have had the opportunity to work on first line emergency responses and applied humanitarian research in all continents; engage in localisation, anti-racism and gender approaches in practice, policy and research. As a researcher, I was also Research Fellow at ALNAP (ODI), with a particular research focus on localisation in Colombia, Lebanon; and humanitarian coordination.
As a female Chilean diaspora member, my interests include decolonisation of aid and research, ethical approaches to humanitarian work and sound social sciences methods. I am currently the Principal Investigator in an MSF research study on equity in research partnerships, particularly with the Global majority countries. In my previous research experience with MSF, I led a study on the impacts of counter-terrorism measures on the impartial provision of health care, centred on the experiences of our first line colleagues in Afghanistan, Iraq and Nigeria. My previous emergency work with MSF, Oxfam and other NGOs has taken me to Somalia, Congo (DRC), Occupied Palestine, Sudan, Colombia, Haiti, Lebanon, Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan.