I have spent my career in work that begins with a good idea and then must survive contact with real institutions, relationships, and constraints. These are a few places where I have helped make that work possible.
From conversation to regional network
From 2022 to present, I’ve helped grow the Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network (CSIDNet), from an initial conversation with Wellcome Trust into a global, volunteer-driven network of over 100 researchers and practitioners working across climate, health, and community-led knowledge production. That has meant building the relationships, governance, participatory funding, and convening capacity needed to work across countries and institutions. It also meant learning, repeatedly, what the network could not carry without clearer roles and a stronger shared rhythm.
Building research capacity inside a fast-moving ecosystem
I helped establish iHub’s research department during formative years of Nairobi’s technology ecosystem (2010-2015). The task was not just to produce research; it was to create a function that could connect local insights, institutional partnerships, and practical learning for start-ups in an ecosystem moving faster than the existing organizational infrastructure.
Turning a promising initiative into an operating function
I have also worked with organizations like Baraza Media Lab building new research and program capacity. The work often starts with a simple problem: the intention is there, but the function does not yet exist. I work with the organization to clarify the work, support early hiring, build the practical systems, and strengthen delivery over time. The point is not about having a beautifully written plan but rather, the right team and rhythms to carry the work forward.
Building a global network across countries and disciplines
From 2014 to 2018, I helped grow the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network, or OCSDNet, a global network of 12 teams of researchers and practitioners working on open science and development. The network brought together grantees supported by IDRC and DFID across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The coordinating team build ways for researchers working in very different institutional and political contexts to learn from one another, produce shared work, and shape a conversation about what open science could mean beyond the institutions that had usually defined it. I supported the network’s research, convening, sub-granting processes, communications, and broader intellectual direction across its four years.
OCSDNet gave me some of my earliest experience of what it takes to hold a distributed international network together. The questions have stayed with me: who sets the agenda, whose knowledge travels, and what does real collaboration require when participants are not coming from the same place?
If you are preparing or repairing a collaborative initiative and need to make it deliverable, request a Delivery Readiness Conversation.
Angela Okune, PhD. 