consultant on research and rights-based programming
I’m a freelance consultant specializing in issues of gender, development, health and human rights, particularly as they relate to marginalized populations such as sex workers, migrants and people who use drugs. My past and current clients include the Asia Development Bank, AIDS Fonds Netherlands, and the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center. I have extensive experience of working on projects both in the United States and in Asia and Africa.
Since 2003, U.S. government funding to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been subject to an anti-prostitution clause forbidding the “promotion of prostitution” by grant recipients. There are few published articles about the effects of PEPFAR’s anti-prostitution policy requirement because discussing activities that are not clearly approved under the funding restrictions can jeopardize a program.
Vampire mania has taken hold and Sonia Shah’s The Fever goes back in time before Twilight and even Dracula to the first vampires: mosquitoes and their parasites. Shah tells a good story, and this story has everything from drama and risk to villains and exotic locations. The villain is malaria, the exotic locations cross the globe over the past millennia, and the drama and risk are life-and-death situations.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch describes the abuse of sex workers by Cambodian police, who declared open season on sex workers in the wake of a new anti-trafficking law that criminalizes sex work. The new law was a response to the perennial threat of US economic sanctions against nations that are not seen to be ‘doing enough’ to combat trafficking in persons.
The State Department’s new Trafficking in Persons report suggests that the Obama administration will opt for evidence-based responses to trafficking over putting restrictions on women “for their own good.”