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

Jo Hine

Jo is a qualified accountant with a strong record in leading finance teams through organisational and operational change. Jo is commercially minded with strong experience in international insurance. Most recently Jo worked for Hiscox as an Interim Chief Financial Officer. Jo has a keen interest in sustainability following completion of The One Planet MBA, The University of Exeter, in 2013. This MBA reviewed the resilience and vulnerability of business models, economies, society and the environment and the impacts of risk management and innovation, within the context of finite resources and increasing demand. Jo’s focus was on the pursuit of demonstrable progress towards sustainability. Jo’s MBA involved a dissertation exploring the uncertainties and subjectivity surrounding sustainability, its recognition and measurement; acknowledging the limitations of measurement and how measures provide messages for informed decision making and action. Jo’s dissertation received the Deans commendation for research.

Michael Jarvis

Michael Jarvis is an expert in good governance and multi-stakeholder approaches and a champion of impactful funding for these issues. He leads the Transparency and Accountability Initiative – a collaborative of funders supporting transparency, participation and accountability related efforts around the globe via over $500 million in active grants. In past roles, notably at the World Bank, he incubated new initiatives ranging from collective action against corruption to a business alliance against malnutrition to the Open Contracting Partnership that promotes better outcomes from $9.5 trillion in public-private contracts globally. With deep expertise on natural resource governance issues, Michael was the World Bank’s Global Lead for Extractives Governance.

Al Kags, Chair

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.

Karolina Olofsson

Karolina Olofsson is a democracy and governance expert with a strong record working in multilateral, governmental and non-profit organisations. She has over 15 years of experience working on citizen participation, accountability mechanisms and aid effectiveness. Karolina has held leadership positions to support democratisation initiatives, such as being the Executive Director for the Oslo Center in Norway and the Director for Advocacy and Communications at Integrity Watch Afghanistan. She has also served as an adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Afghanistan and the Presidenza del Consiglio Dei Ministri in Italy on accountability and anti-corruption initiatives to strengthen institutional capacity to reduce abuse of power and misuse of resources.

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.

Jenna Slotin

Jenna Slotin is Senior Director of Policy at the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, a global network of over 700 partners from the public, private and civil society sectors committed to using data and technology to reduce inequality and drive sustainability. At the Global Partnership, she leads on policy engagement and oversees the data values agenda. Jenna has nearly 20 years’ experience in the development sector specialising in political analysis and influencing, research and thought leadership, and programme design and implementation. She has led programmes that aimed to influence public sector decision-making on data and technology, sustainable development, and peacebuilding.

Verity Jowett, Company Secretary

Verity has worked in risk and governance within healthcare since 2010 and over this time has developed a special interest in the design and delivery of effective governance systems. She has a track record of delivering successful governance transformation at the local, regional and national level, most recently as Company Secretary and Executive Lead for Governance at a national healthcare charity.

She is currently focusing on completing her Chartered Governance Institute qualification and gaining experience of governance outside healthcare as Company Secretary of Publish What You Fund.

 

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

• Giles Bolton
• Paul Lenz
• 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 was 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.