Peer Reviewers
The Peer Reviewers of The Racial Equity Index serve as an independent body of experts who review and provide critical feedback for reports, surveys, and any additional outputs in support of the build of the index at large.
Anjalee Kohli
Anjalee Kohli is an implementation scientist with 20 years of experience in global health. Through participatory and mixed methods research and learning partnerships, she seeks to advance the evidence and practice for the prevention of gender-based violence and violence against children. She is skilled in developing collaborative and values-based partnerships with local, national, and international organizations to improve programming and research.
As an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Anjalee leads several initiatives to understand whether and how social norms effect young people’s sexual and reproductive health, gender equity, and gender-based violence. She is an advocate for ethical thinking in social norms program design, implementation, and partnership.
Anjalee provides technical assistance and capacity-building partnerships to apply social and gender norms theory and evidence to program design, implementation, and evaluation. In addition, she has led and been part of several evaluation studies to understand whether and how violence prevention programs achieve healthier relationships, communication, and parenting, characterized by nonviolence. She has worked with Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, based in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with FHI-India.
Anjalee is a member of the Community for Understanding Scale-Up, a collective of 12 individuals from 8 feminist Global South and Global North organizations with effective norms change programs who meet regularly, in dialogue and reflection. Our recent thinking and advocacy for scaling gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and rights programs centers around feminist scale, a dynamic and inter-connected concept that includes supporting local women’s rights movements and being grounded in feminist values and the elements of scale. She has participated on several advisory boards for projects seeking to advance gender-based violence prevention.
Anjalee has a PhD from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
David Murillo
David Murillo is a professional in Government and International Affairs and has a Masters Degree in Management for Development from the Externado University of Colombia. David was part of the Mel King Community Fellows Program on Economic Democracy 2016-2018, led by the MIT CoLab. He was a researcher of Ethnical and Racial Justice in Dejusticia, and he was project coordinator and manager at Manos Visibles, a non-profit organization. Currently, David is an advisor in the Ministry of Sports of Colombia where he seeks to generate processes that articulate sports within the life of the youth of Colombia. David has conducted research and written articles on the different social and economic factors that aggravate or solve inequality gaps, especially racial justice gaps, in Colombia and the Global South.
Kirthi Jayakumar
Kirthi Jayakumar is an activist, artist, entrepreneur and writer from Chennai, India. She founded and runs The Gender Security Project, one of the few WPS centres in the global south, which works at the cusp of gender, security, peace, and conflict through research, reportage, and documentation. Kirthi holds an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies as a Commonwealth Scholarship Awardee from CTPSR, Coventry University, an MA in Sustainable Peace in a Contemporary World from UPEACE, Costa Rica, and a bachelor’s degree in Law from SOEL, Chennai.
Kirthi is a Vital Voices Engage Fellow, and a former Vital Voices Lead Fellow. Kirthi coded an app for survivors of gender-based violence called Saahas, which works as a web and mobile app. She taught herself to code and created a web app, a mobile app and a Facebook ChatBot to support survivors of gender-based violence across 196 countries, and to assist bystander intervention. Her areas of interest include gender studies, peace and conflict research, security studies, and international human rights and humanitarian law. She formerly founded and ran the Red Elephant Foundation, a civilian peacebuilding initiative that works for gender equality through storytelling, advocacy, and digital interventions.
Masana Ndinga-Kanga
Masana Ndinga-Kanga is the Crisis Response Fund Lead at CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation, an alliance of over 9000 civil society actors world-wide. She works to ensure that civic liberties are respected for groups advancing human rights around the world, with a specific focus on the MENA region and Women Human Rights Defenders. Masana is also lead author on UNDP report (and journal article) "Forging a Resilient Social Contract in South Africa: States and Societies Sustaining Peace in the Post-Apartheid Era." Previously, she was Research Programme Manager at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation where she served on the National Steering Committee of the Integrated Social Crime Prevention Strategy of the Department of Social Development, and she is currently a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equality at the London School of Economics.
In 2018, Masana was identified as one of the London School of Economics’ Leading Women in their #LSEWomen campaign. She is also the author and producer of documentary and research report "Triple Jeopardy: Race, Class and Gender Among the Black Middle Class in South Africa." Published in several journals, newspapers and online fora, Masana has a multi-disciplinary background in African Studies, politics, economics, international development and law, with an MSc in Political Economy of Late Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.Com. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Cape Town. She has worked at the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights in Washington D.C., the Poverty and Inequality Initiative (UCT) and as the first Machel-Mandela Fellow at The Brenthurst Foundation in Johannesburg. Masana is an alumnus of the South African Washington International Program and the David & Elaine Potter Fellowship.
Masana is a Chevening Scholar from 2012–13 and a Leading Causes of Life Fellow. She currently serves as chairwomxn of a grassroots organization, the Institute for Justice for Workers, and as a board member of the Reggio Emilia school, Mimosa. She is fiercely passionate about feminist parenting, queer and economic justice in Africa through the transformation of the international political economy for greater accountability by governments and corporates.
Fernando DePaolis
Fernando DePaolis is the Dean of the Graduate School of International Policy and Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). In addition, he teaches Data Analysis, Development Economics, and other advanced quantitative policy analysis courses. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of California-Los Angeles. He has been the Regional Economist with the Denver Regional Council of Governments (Denver, Colorado).
Over the years, Professor DePaolis has consulted extensively for cities and counties in the United States, international organizations, and multiple non-governmental organizations. Professor DePaolis is also a senior researcher at the MIIS Center for the Blue Economy, where he develops research and teaches courses on the problems and solutions at the interface between large bodies of water (oceans and lakes) and urban agglomerations. Prof. DePaolis has been a Fulbright-LASPAU scholar. At MIIS, he has been Assistant Dean, Program Chair, and President of the Faculty Senate. In his spare time, Prof. DePaolis is an avid outdoorsman, off-roader and explorer of the California wilderness.