Sally Smith
Gender Lead & Senior Researcher
Sally joined ARI in early 2023 as Gender Lead and Senior Researcher, but her collaboration with Martha and Richard Anker dates to 2016 when she led an Anker Benchmark study in Ghana.
Sally has been researching employment, livelihoods, poverty, gender, and inequality in global value chains for more than two decades, initially as an academic at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, where she contributed to seminal research on the effectiveness of voluntary standards for regulating (gendered) labour practices.
As an independent consultant, she has provided research and advisory services to a range of international and not-for-profit organizations, including IFAD, WFP, Fairtrade International, Ethical Trading Initiative, Open Society Foundations, and Oxfam, and has been a member of various boards and advisory committees.
Her work has spanned more than 25 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and multiple products (bananas, cocoa, coffee, cosmetics, cotton, flowers, fresh fruits and vegetables, garments, tea, wine grapes), and she has published widely in academic journals, edited books, and other media. Sally has a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and an MA (Distinction) in International Development.