Haidee-Laure Giles

Human Rights Advocate. Specialist in strategic development, building networks and raising support major international foundations and government institutions. Trainer and mentor. Technical expert in the area of Business and Human Rights.

Haidee-Laure has a unique mix of experience working both across the nonprofit and private sectors, and has been driving change for more than 20 years in partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders.

Haidee-Laure has worked in various countries in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East, managing socio-economic programmes and leading advocacy with a particular focus on women’s rights, livelihoods, food security, workers’ rights, refugee issues, climate change and more recently the impact of technology onto vulnerable populations. She speaks five languages. She is the founder of two NGOs in Portugal and serves as Vice-President of a small organisation denouncing human rights violations and promoting joint actions in Portuguese-speaking countries.

Haidee-Laure also has experience in Business and Human Rights, working with companies to strengthen their practices through Human Rights Due Diligence and the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. She has participated in multi-stakeholder initiatives to bridge different disciplines and foster a better understanding of the strategic value of embedding human rights due diligence within business operations.

She holds an LLM in Human Rights Law.

Key Skills

• Partnership building and development (government, NGOs, private sector, social movements, and grassroots organisations)
• Project development and management
• Due diligence, risk and impact assessments
• Project monitoring and evaluation
• Accomplished bid-writing and contract management (UKAid, SwedishAid, private foundations, EU, Lottery Funding, UN)
• Strategic thinker
• Human Rights advocate
• Policy analysis
• Hugely successful fundraiser
• Passionate about achieving socio-economic change based on values of justice and equity

Experience

Haidee-Laure has led multi-country programmes and advocacy on food justice, in partnership with grassroots organisations and government. In 2010 she contributed to the creation of the UK Food Sovereignty movement and lobbied for the first UK Bill on Agroecology adopted in 2014.

She has worked on refugee issues in Bangladesh in the largest refugee camp in the world and in Greece, and has carried out assignments for nonprofit such as Amref Health Africa, Health Care Without Harm, PAX, the Mozilla Foundation, Tor Project and many more. More recently, she has been working as the lead consultant on a ground-breaking assignment with the Tor project, that aims to strengthen the safety of Human Rights Defenders and journalists online, so they can carry out their important work in repressive regimes with far less risk of arrest.

As Programme manager within the nonprofit, she has secured large grants from a range of key donors, including UKAid, SIDA, the EU, UN agencies and large Foundations. She managed strategic partnership frameworks with bilateral funders with a portfolio value of USD$10.9m. As part of such a framework with SIDA, she successfully negotiated a 30% funding increase and was awarded an annual USD$8.8m for a portfolio of international projects, as well as the rare allocation of USD$80k of unrestricted funding.

She has carried out Human Rights Risk Assessments for clients in the tobacco and coffee sectors, and developed CSR Strategy aiming at fostering public-private partnerships.

Languages

Bilingual French/English, fluent in Portuguese and working knowledge of Spanish and Italian.

To contact Haidee-Laure, please email joanna@abbeysolutions.co.uk or call +44 207 859 4701

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