Speakers

Alexander Betts is Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs, William Golding Senior Fellow in Politics at Brasenose College, and Associate Head (Doctoral and Research Training) of the Social Science Division, at the University of Oxford. He served as Director of the Refugee Studies Centre between 2014 and 2017. His research focuses mainly on the political economy of refugee assistance, with a focus on Africa.

He is co-author, with Paul Collier, of Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System (Penguin Allen Lane and Oxford University Press, 2017), which was named by the Economist as one of the ‘Best Books of 2017’. His other books include Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2013), Protection by Persuasion: International Cooperation in the Refugee Regime (Cornell University Press, 2009) and Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2016), amongst others.

He is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, was named by Foreign Policy magazine in the top 100 global thinkers of 2016, and his TED talks have been viewed by over 3 million people. He has previously worked for UNHCR and has served as a Councillor on the World Refugee Council. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian. He currently leads the IKEA Foundation-funded Refugee Economies Programme, which undertakes participatory research on the economic lives of refugees in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. He received his MPhil (with distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Béatrice has extensive experience in investment banking and business development, acquired in Tier-1 investment banks. She has held leadership roles at companies that ranged in size from an asset management start-up to Deutsche Bank, where she was a Managing Director. She was the CEO of a large not-for-profit manufacturing company in Belgium that creates job opportunities for workers with disabilities. She has a commercial engineering degree from Université Libre de Bruxelles and has received microfinance training from the Grameen Bank.

Béatrice is first and foremost interested in bringing her diverse expertise to support highly impactful projects for the left behind. Since joining KOIS in 2017, she has lent her financial structuring, business management, fund-raising and stakeholder management skills to advising the Solvay Sustainable Guar Initiative and Light for the World Belgium on their scale-up plans, and to bringing KOIS’s Refugee Livelihoods DIB to fruition, among others.

Joanna leads the UK government's work on refugee integration working across Whitehall, with local authorities and with external stakeholders (UN agencies, businesses, social investors, funders and academics). She previously set up and led a multidisciplinary team to deliver a cross-government programme for the Chief Executive of the Civil Service on the effectiveness of UK Government grant-making.

Samir has extensive experience in employment and impact investment. He currently works as Head of Program Management at S-Bank. He manages two impact investment funds focusing on employment and integration of immigrants and employment of those experiencing long-term unemployment. He previously worked as founder and CEO of a recruitment company for 10 years. After that, he joined a small fund management company which specialises in social impact bonds.

Samir has deep expertise in building impact investment funds from start to finish. His experience includes fund set up, fundraising, financial modeling and development and management of intervention programs. He is also among the leading experts on innovative public-private partnerships in the employment sector in Finland.

Simon Porcher is Associate Professor of Strategy and Public Management at IAE Paris. He studies government contracting and the use of artificial intelligence in organisations. He also builds big comparative datasets. Prior joining IAE Paris, Simon Porcher was a fellow at the London School of Economics and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute.

Stéphane Saussier is also a Professor of Economics and Management at the Sorbonne Business School. He is also Director of the Water area at the Florence School of Regulation. He is a specialist of contract and organization theories. Since 2009, he has been running a research group working on the Economics of Public Private Partnerships at the Sorbonne. He published more than 40 articles, many in international journals such as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Industrial and Corporate Change, Review of Industrial Organization, International Journal of the Economics and Business, European Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Marketing Channels, Journal of Transport and Economic Policy, Utilities Policy.

He is also regularly involved in reports for international institutions such as OECD and European Parliament. For the last 10 years, he has expanded his work towards public private contracts and the organization of public services. He has developed research studies in the water sector with the French authority in charge of water services performance indicators and sunshine regulation.

Tanyah Hameed is a public policy researcher and project manager. She currently works as an Associate at Social Finance, a not-for-profit consultancy that partners with governments and charities to tackle social problems in the UK and globally.

She researches and advises UK government (both central and local) and charities on multiple areas within social impact. Most recently, she has managed projects aimed at supporting refugees into employment and housing, costing system failure in supporting individuals with multiple disadvantages, and co-producing evidence around learning disabilities & autism services. She is particularly interested in the potential role that cross sector collaborations and social impact investment can play within both higher income and lower middle income countries and has extensive experience around social investment (social impact bonds/ outcomes funds/ outcomes based contracts).

Tanyah has 7+ years of experience working in public policy research and international development across the UK (University of Oxford, Social Finance UK), Pakistan (Ministry of Planning, Development and Reform; Plan International; Ministry of Commerce) and the UN (UNDP Pakistan; World Food Programme Headquarters). She holds an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BS in Economics from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Pakistan where she was a sliver medallist. In her spare time, she serves as a trustee for a local charity, Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action (OCVA), which supports the VCSE sector across Oxfordshire.