Rachel is a social development researcher and practitioner with a strong focus on gender, childhood, youth and adolescence. She is an expert in conducting rigorous evidence reviews.

Rachel has 25 years’ experience as a social development researcher and practitioner.  She has particular expertise in conducting rigorous evidence reviews, with a focus on gender, childhood, youth and adolescence and social inclusion. Her main areas of thematic interest are social and gender norm change, education, skills and economic empowerment. She has also worked on social aspects of climate change and child protection.

In recent years she has led evidence reviews on non-formal education programmes to shift gender norms, gender and youth livelihoods development; gender equality in formal education; protection of child migrants; youth civic and political participation; and effective integration of anti-poverty and child protection programmes. She is a lead technical advisor for the ALIGN platform, which brings together research and innovation to challenge discriminatory and harmful gender norms and has undertaken various training assignments on social and gender norms. She also co-leads the evidence synthesis workstream for the Gender and Adolescence Global Evidence programme (GAGE). 

Before joining ODI, Rachel was an independent consultant, and has worked for DFID as a Social Development Advisor, and for Save the Children as a Research and Policy Advisor, where she served as Director of the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre. As an independent consultant Rachel has undertaken assignments for Girl Hub on adolescent girls, for the World Bank and UNICEF on childhood, youth and social exclusion, and for DFID on youth and gender.  Rachel has worked in the following countries: Belize, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kyrgyzstan, India, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Pakistan and Tanzania.