Desiree Acholla

Désirée Acholla is a first-year Collaborative Doctoral Award student in History at the University of Southampton and the University of Exeter through the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Her professional work and research focuses on the humanitarian and international development sector. With growing criticism of harm caused in the name of ‘doing good,’ she is interested in understanding how international non-government organizations (and the experts they rely on) respond to calls for reform in the sector. In context of current efforts to decolonise aid, her PhD project explores a chronology of previous attempts to transform the practices, funding, and assumptions of global development from 1960 to present-day. She is conducting this research as a historical case study of ODI, a global affairs think tank that was founded as the Overseas Development Institute in London.