
Leisa Perch
Leisa Perch, SAEDI Consulting Barbados Inc’s Managing Director, Founder and Practice Manager, has more than 22 years in development; working for more than 20 years on environmental management issues, she has provided technical expertise at national, regional and international levels including research to inform policy and decision-making processes from a social and gender perspective.
She has worked across the English-speaking Caribbean, in Latin America (Brazil), Southern Africa (in Mozambique and South Africa as well as on Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Madagascar), as well as Asia and the Pacific and Europe and the CIS, providing advisory services to development actors and governments. She is widely published, is an IPCC author and has a body of work on the green economy featuring the Arab States region and China. She has served as a Deputy Country Representative for UN Women, contributing to strategic planning, programme development and project oversight including taking the lead on the office’s post-disaster drought response in 2016 and related efforts on climate-resilient agriculture.
As a development consultant over the last 5 years, she has worked on various aspects of gender equality and women’s empowerment programming including gender analysis, GESI analysis, social and gender risk and impact assessments, gender assessments and gender action plans. She regularly conducts research on gender and environment, gender and natural resource management and gender and climate – the latter is the core of SAEDI’s work. She is SAEDI Consulting’s Lead Trainer and is regularly invited to speak on gender and environment/gender and climate issues throughout the Caribbean and beyond. She is a member of the Caribbean Action Learning Group on the Green Economy coordinated by CANARI, Advancing Women in Development or AWID, the Society of Gender Professionals (SGP) as well as Regenerate Barbados and the UWI CERMES’ Gender in Fisheries Team.