We are grateful to all of our Board Members for their support to the organisation.

Giles Bolton

Giles Bolton is Responsible Sourcing Director at Tesco. He leads a team of 45 human rights and environmental experts around the world, responsible for ensuring good working conditions and sustainable sourcing across Tesco’s supply chain. Prior to joining Tesco, Giles worked for the UK Government’s Department for International Development for ten years, including roles in Kenya, Iraq and as head of the UK’s aid programme in Rwanda. In 2008 he wrote the activist book ‘Aid and Other Dirty Business’, on how western aid, trade and globalisation affect Africa, published in the UK, US and Canada.  Giles is a Member Board Director of the Ethical Trading Initiative and of SEDEX, the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange. Giles was Chair of Publish What You Fund between 2016 and 2019.

Al Kags

Al Kags is a marketing and communications expert, serial entrepreneur, accomplished writer and poet, passionate futurist and champion of government openness through data. Al is the founder of the Open Institute, an African organisation that works with governments and civil society organisations to promote open government and citizen engagement. He sits on the Technical Advisory Committee of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and has served as a member of the Global Open Data Working Group and the Global Open Data Initiative and was the co-chair of the Kenya OGP Working Group, chair of the Kenya Open Data Taskforce and the Kenya Open Government Initiative. Al is a Mandela Washington Fellow (2014) and was recognised as a New Generation African Leader (2013) – African Leadership Network.

Hetty Kovach

Hetty is a Senior Program Officer for International Development Finance leading its work on ODA and bilateral financing mechanisms and institutions. Hetty has spent the last four years at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a policy analyst in the Development Assistance Committee’s (DAC) Peer Review Division. She has reviewed the performance of seven DAC donors assessing the quality of their development cooperation policies and programmes in several recipient countries.

In her last year at the OECD, Hetty also led the DAC Network on Governance (GovNet), which brings together donors, international and civil society organisations to promote more effective governance in developing countries. Prior to the OECD, Hetty worked at Oxfam for six years leading their international policy and research team on aid effectiveness and development finance. She also worked for three years at European Network for Debt and Development (EURODAD). She is co-author of several Oxfam reports on aid effectiveness and wrote the first Concord/EURODAD AidWatch Report on EU Aid.

Paul Lenz, Chair

Paul Lenz is the Trust Executive at Indigo Trust,  which funds education, agriculture and transparency and accountability initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa. He was previously Head of Finance and International Projects for mySociety, where he led the international engagement team. Paul’s role covered overall operational management, with a focus on working with partner groups to use mySociety’s tools and open-source code base to drive democratic engagement and accountability around the world. This included managing the re-launch of Mzalendo.com in Kenya and developing pa.org.za with the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in South Africa.

Paul has an MA in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford and an Advanced Post-Graduate Diploma in Environmental Decision Making from the Open University. Prior to joining mySociety Paul worked in the commercial sector for 15 years in a range of marketing and management roles, most recently with BT Group PLC. Paul became Chair of Publish What You Fund in December 2019.

Andrea Ordóñez

Andrea Ordóñez is Director of Southern Voice, a network of think tanks devoted to bringing research from the Global South to international debates on the development agenda. She co-edited the book “Southern Perspectives on the Post-2015 International Development Agenda” with Debapriya Bhattacharya that compiles the research on a diversity of development issues by researchers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Her work focuses on better linking researchers from the Global South with their counterparts in other countries, strengthening their presence in international debates and fostering policies that promote sustainable development. She was previously Research Director at Grupo FARO, a think tank in Ecuador. Andrea has developed projects on public finances, natural resource wealth management, and financing for development.

Justine Tordoff

Justine Tordoff is Head of HR at HelpAge International, and has over 18 years’ experience of working in large, complex international NGO’s on a wide range of HR and organisational development issues. She previously held positions as South Asia Regional HR Manager and Deputy International HR Director at Oxfam, and as HR Director for RedR UK and Transaid. Justine has worked across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. She has experience of large scale humanitarian response and of helping INGOs devolve power and localise their operations.

Loretto Leavy, FCG/FCIS, Company Secretary

Loretto has worked in governance for almost two decades across a number of sectors spanning insurance, banking, asset management, pensions, universities, charities, professional bodies, chartered bodies and regulators. In these roles, she has successfully deployed governance frameworks across multiple jurisdictions, devised solutions which support business aims, ensured proportional regulatory compliance and raised the profile of governance to be an effective business partnering function. Loretto also served as Trustee for Magpas Air Ambulance for 8 years to 2021, serving as Chair of Remuneration and Nomination Committees which gave her the opportunity to be involved in a clinical governance focused charity while deploying her corporate governance skills in a non-executive director capacity. Loretto is currently Head of Governance at Hiscox (a premium listed global insurance provider). She is also researching stewardship, accountability and transparency mechanisms for effective boards in organisations.

We would like to thank our former Board members, including:

• Owen Barder
• Geoff Broadhurst
• Ellen Miller
• Sarah Mulley
• Fran Perrin
• Martin Tisne
• Eloise Todd
• Alexander Woolcombe
• Simon Gill

Founder and Patron

Karin Christiansen

Karin Christiansen is the founding CEO and Patron of Publish What You Fund. She was previously General Secretary of the Co-operative Party and currently also Chair of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Before setting up Publish What You Fund, Karin worked as a Policy Manager at ONE and Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). She joined ODI having worked as an Economist at the Rwandan Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture. Prior to that, Karin worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2011 Karin was named as one of the Devex London 40 Under 40 International Development Leaders.

We are also very grateful to the other founders of Publish What You Fund:

• Martin Tisne is Investment Director at the Omidyar Network and previously set up Integrity Watch Afghanistan. Martin was Chief Executive of Tiri, (now Integrity Action) which incubated Publish What You Fund from 2008-11.
• Helen Darbishire is Founder and Director of AccessInfo Europe. She brought the freedom of information perspective to Publish What You Fund’s development.
• Owen Barder led the aidinfo team at Development Initiatives from 2009-12, which recommended the creation of an open data standard. He is now head of the Center for Global Development Europe.

Read more about the Board’s Terms of Reference.
Read the minutes from Board Meetings.