About
Sylvia Horname Noagbesenu Nutsukpui

I began my career as a Lawyer or an Attorney, by providing legal advice, legal opinions and written submissions or position papers on different array of legal issues to clients - individuals, companies as well as national, regional and international institutions. I also provided pro bono advice and support to clients in legal aid sessions and facilitated mediation sessions between families on issues related to family law and access to justice. In collaboration with other organizations and firms, I have lobbied and advocated on women and children’s rights issues across the African Continent.

Passionate about changing lives, building communities and transforming societies, I also spent the early part of my career supporting and guiding communities (especially women) in different parts of Africa to organize and establish relevant community structures, strengthen their voices and build resilience against discriminatory practices and lobby local authorities to improve the living conditions of community members. Critical and interesting among these experiences were the opportunities I had to support grassroots women in various communities in Africa, to loudly name and document the undocumented and undervalued practices that demonstrate, the energy, abilities, innovation and leadership of organized women to effect change in their communities. Experiences from Kwabenya and Old Fadama in Ghana to Kibera and Kisumu in Kenya and Lusaka in Zambia were simply awesome, utterly gratifying and totally fulfilling!

Further, on the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) front, which is an area I love to spend my time as well, especially, having worked for the globally recognized not for profit, the Geneva headquartered Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), I gained extensive experience working with modern concepts of NGO management, project development and management in the NGO sector, research and evaluation in NGO sector, advancing the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights and providing strategic advice to Governments on the domestication of international and regional human rights frameworks into national laws, policies and institutions.

As a Social Policy Specialist, my experiences over the years focused on providing policy advise, policy development, analysis and advocacy. These experiences spanned from national to regional and to international levels. I developed policy documents out of legal researches and capacity building programmes I undertook, broadly shared these with different governments and institutions and utilized same as advocacy tools to engage national, regional and international organizations for policy and legal reforms. Critical among these include various engagements with different African governments and regional bodies such as the Economic Community of West African State (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU). A groundbreaking example is my close engagement with the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (www.achpr.org) especially supporting the work of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women in Africa. Here, I submitted oral and written policy documents and led several legal and policy related processes in support of the implementation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and the Protocol on Women’s Rights to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (Maputo Protocol).

Specifically, I facilitated initiatives with other women rights organization in Africa and abroad especially, with the Global initiative – Economic Social, Cultural Rights, USA, Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa (ISLA), Kenya Human Rights Commission, FIDA Kenya and the Human Rights Centre, University of Pretoria, South Africa and led the development and advocacy of the first ever Resolution on Land and Natural Resources as well as jointly worked on the General Comment on Article 7(d) of the Maputo Protocol at the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR).

At the international level, I also submitted policy documents and reports to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council; the UN Universal Periodic Review, the Human Rights Committee, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Committee and the World Bank Inspection Panel. It is worthy of mention that most of my recommendations from these submitted reports resulted into very concrete concluding observations and actions which were translated into national policies among others.

As a Gender Expert and in my bid to ensuring fairness and equality between women and men and girls and boys to access resources, responsibilities and opportunities, I spent a considerable number of my years of my career advising national and regional institutions, coordinating national and regional advocacy programmes on gender equality and advocating for gender sensitive laws, policies, structures and programmes. As the Africa Regional Office Manager and the Women’s Land Link Africa Project Manager at COHRE, I led many gender analysis, gender audits, gender sensitive advocacy, capacity building, monitoring and evaluation and women’s empowerment initiatives for different organizations and companies in more than 40 African Countries including Cameroun, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia among others. I also undertook research and analysis of the legal framework of women’s housing, land and inheritance rights, documented best practices, case laws and test cases relevant to the African jurisprudence. This gave me an immeasurable opportunity to be fully familiar with the African landscape, history, laws, gaps, challenges and related developmental issues. I also contributed to the women, peace and security agenda through my engagement (for over a decade) with the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Ghana. KAIPTC was a groundbreaking place for me from a gendered perspective as I broke the glass ceiling of becoming the only female on the seven-member Executive Management Team, the only female among four Directors of Departments and the second female Director in the history of the institution.

To bring these experiences to bear, ten years ago, I co-founded and acts as the Executive Director for Initiative for Gender Equality and Development in Africa (IGED-Africa, www.igedafrica.org ), a dutifully registered not for profit aimed at transforming lives and societies through promoting and advancing gender equality and sustainable development on the Continent. Building on this and to sustain my work, I also founded two other companies, firstly, GenderLenz Afrique Consult(www.genderlenzafrique.com ) a consultancy firm, focused on promoting inclusion, diversity and women’s leadership in all spheres of life from the community to the boardroom and secondly, Resource Hub for Development, Africa (REHUD, Africa) aimed at training and equipping young people and utilizing the necessary resources, tools, skills and competencies to mold them into all rounded leaders for a sustainable individual and societal development.

Through this, I am able to support individuals, companies, startups and organizations to advance gender equality, integrate and mainstream gender and implement gender and leadership perspectives in/for their businesses, places of work and labour related issues. These processes, I can confidently say have had very positive impact on businesses and companies as effective gender inclusion and diverse workforce promotes employee engagement and job satisfaction, allowing companies to more easily attract and retain the best talent, leading to an increased productivity and opportunities.

Additionally, I built very specific expertise in strategic planning processes, project development and management, organizational development, monitoring and evaluation and stakeholder engagement processes for government institutions, private businesses, startups as well as public companies and institutions. It is very exciting to mention that all of these have resulted into impactful improvement of all the performance indicators for the institutions I have supported.

I have critically and enviably nurtured my project management and stakeholder engagement experiences to the admiration of colleagues and peers. In my function as the Director, Policy Planning Monitoring and Evaluation at the KAIPTC, I contributed to the organizational strategic planning processes, led the development of the organizational annual plans and activities, managed projects and strategically engaged a wide array of Development and institutional stakeholders. In other words, I was responsible for sustaining the relations between KAIPTC and its partners such as ECOWAS, Africa Union, European Union, the Governments of Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Nigeria, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA among others and for that matter represented the KAIPTC in international meetings and conferences. This led to the establishment of excellent co-operations and healthy relations with Governments as well as national, regional and international organizations as mentioned above including, NGOs and CSOs of mutual interest. With the above, I am able to nurture and translate simple partnerships into fruitful long lasting collaborations to increase opportunities, enhance innovation and maximize profit.

On a personal level, I have excellent conceptual, diagnostic, analytical, writing and presentation skills my attention to detail and excellent problem-solving skills ensure that every project I work on is done accurately from beginning to the end. My positive attitude, excellent communication and highly developed interpersonal skills and ability to work with people from diverse backgrounds make me an effective communicator and a team player and I have the flair to drive ideas and strategies towards practical solutions.

Having said this, I thank you for spending time to read about me and I look forward to an opportunity to serve and support you, your communities, businesses, startups, companies, organizations or institutions in the various areas of work as listed below. Just contact me.