Lyn Messner
Program Officer, Africa

Lyn Messner, who joined IWHC in July 2005, is a development anthropologist with direct field experience in 25 countries. Over the past 13 years, she has built diverse expertise in project and program planning and assessment, training design and facilitation, research, and grantmaking, all with a particular focus on gender equality and women's participation. As Program Officer for Africa, Lyn is primarily responsible for coordinating IWHC's partnerships with women- and youth-led organizations in Nigeria, and with regional networks that bring together organizations and individuals working on sexual and reproductive rights across the African continent.

Lyn was first drawn to work on gender and development after witnessing the dynamics between men and women as a secondary school teacher in a village in Lesotho, where she spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer after graduating from college. During her time in Lesotho, Lyn learned the local language, and collaborated with the village chieftainess to have a fresh water pump installed at the local clinic. Inspired by the experience, Lyn returned to the United States and pursued a masters degree in Development Anthropology from The George Washington University. She went on to join Save the Children in 1995, and played a central role in crafting and implementing a new organizational strategy that acknowledged women's central role in improving children lives, and increased staff members' capacity to analyze their work from a gender perspective.

In 1998 Lyn returned to the Peace Corps as the agency's Women in Development/ Gender and Development Coordinator, where her work focused on increasing women's and girls' participation and empowerment in over 220 Peace Corps projects in agriculture, education, environment, health, HIV/AIDS, microenterprise, and youth development. Building on her work at Save the Children, Lyn developed and conducted a training program to raise awareness of women's and girls' critical role in development processes and build gender analysis skills among Peace Corps headquarters, field staff, and volunteers.

After leaving the Peace Corps in 2004, Lyn wrote a synthesis paper on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in Africa as an independent consultant for UNIFEM (the United Nations Development Fund for Women). In 2005, she helped develop a program strategy for the USAID Mission in Zambia aimed at addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic's disproportionate impact on girls, orphans, and women through primary school programs that promote gender equality. Lyn has authored and edited widely used program and training documents, field resources, newsletters, and status reports for domestic and international audiences. Her publications include Gender Relations Analysis: A Guide for Trainers, From Analysis to Action: Integrating Gender into Programs, Beyond the Classroom: Empowering Girls, Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) Handbook for Volunteers, Gender Implications for Youth Development Work, and Involving Men in Gender Equitable Development.