Erin Kitchell is the Managing Director of the Land, Environment, and Climate program at Namati. In her role, Erin leads on strategy for grassroots justice initiatives on land rights and environmental justice. For nearly a decade, she has worked closely with Namati programs in Africa, Asia, and the U.S. to design and test innovative legal empowerment approaches. While at Namati, Erin led a collective effort to develop a learning agenda for legal empowerment with members of the Grassroots Justice Network, the world’s largest community of justice advocates. She has experience managing large-scale action research projects and partnering with grassroots organizations to distill collective insights on the burning questions for the field.
Erin has more than 15 years of experience working on land rights, environmental governance, and climate, with a particular focus on pastoralists and smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Erin holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a National Science Foundation Fellow and a USAID Research and Innovation Fellow.