Centre for Global Equality

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Lara is Director of the Centre for Global Equality (formerly The Humanitarian Centre), a position she has held since October 2014. The Centre contributes to greater global equality by enhancing access for people in the developing world to resources that would not normally be available to them. The Centre works with communities to identify and resolve problems in collaboration with a broad network of civil society organisations, businesses and academics. Innovative solutions to global challenges are evolved through the Centre’s Global Goals Innovation Cultivator (GGIC), which takes innovations through a five stage process from problem identification to impact.

Lara has extensive experience working in academia and in international development. Previously, she was Head of Research, Monitoring and Evaluation at the Irish NGO Misean Cara, and Executive Director of Tshulu Trust, a non-profit organisation that promotes sustainable development in an underdeveloped rural part of South Africa's Limpopo Province. She has a particular interest in evolving effective models of interaction between universities and poor communities that make university capacities and resources available to poor communities in a mutually beneficial manner.

Lara holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Cambridge. She spent several years in South Africa, where she was a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in the Wits School of Arts and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER).