Transition Committee

The Transition Committee has the mandate to take the necessary steps to:

• Enable a smooth transition to a new governance structure, through the election of a new Board of Trustees at the Governing Council meeting in May and the first meeting of the Board in July 2020;
• Lay the foundation for developing a new resource allocation formula and system based on the guidance given by the GA;
• Ensure that MAs remain central to the change process and participate in decision-making on how the reforms are monitored and evaluated.

Read the letter from the Transition Committee Chair

Mr. Andreas Prager (Chair)

Andreas is a business technology consultant in Christchurch, New Zealand.  His consulting business works with a wide variety of sectors – including health, local government, and energy – with a focus on strategy, governance, organisational change and business process improvement. Andreas has worked in senior management roles in the mining, consulting and health sectors, including as the Director Information Services (CIO) for the Southern District Health Board in New Zealand. Andreas is the President of Family Planning New Zealand, Regional Chairperson for the IPPF ESEAO Region, and a member of the IPPF Governing Council. Andreas strongly believes in equity of access being at the forefront of enabling Choice in SRHR through eliminating service inequalities and delivering sexual and reproductive health and rights in the areas of highest need. At the recent GC meeting in Delhi he was elected as the Chairperson for the Transition Committee overseeing Phase 2 of the governance and resource allocation reforms.

Ms. Dyuti Krishnan

Dyuti is a Finance Management Trainee with Marriott International, where she works at the Sheraton Hyderabad Hotel while also pursuing her Strategic Level of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). Dyuti is process-oriented, and her expertise lies in change management and internal auditing. She intends to leverage this learning in the field of SRHR to identify root-cause of strategy failures, and re-design the same to establish the fundamental connection with the beneficiaries of these SRHR services. Dyuti is the Vice Chairperson to the IPPF South-Asia Region, Youth Network, and a Youth Representative on the Central Executive Committee of Family Planning Association of India (FPAI). As a volunteer for FPAI over the past six years, Dyuti has played an active role in advocacy for comprehensive sexuality education, while being a member of the LGBTQA community herself. 

Ms. Waimarama Matena

Waimarama is a full time medical student from Dunedin, New Zealand and will be graduating as a medical doctor in 2021. With special interests in women’s and children’s health, indigenous health, and socioeconomic determinants of health, she hopes to specialise in one of these fields after graduating. When she isn’t at university Waimarama works with indigenous rights and policy as a research assistant at The Waitangi Tribunal Unit, NZ, and she is an active member of her community engaging in health volunteer work, academic tutoring, and mentoring of other aspiring Maori doctors. She joined the Council of NZ Family Planning Association in 2018 as a youth representative, and in 2019 she was elected as the regional youth representative for the IPPF ESEAO Region on the Governing Council. Waimarama was nominated to serve on the Transition Committee to provide a strong youth voice as IPPF moves forward with Phase II of the resource allocation and governance reforms in 2020.

Ms. Tracy Robinson

Tracy is a leading expert on gender and rights in the Caribbean and provides judicial training in Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, and Trinidad and Tobago. A Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of the West Indies, she co-founded the university’s Rights Advocacy Project, which has led strategic litigation in the Anglophone Caribbean on criminalisation of LGBT persons. She was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights between 2012 and 2015, serving as its Rapporteur for the Rights of Women and the Rapporteur for the Rights of LGBTI Persons. Tracy has authored many papers and reports on gender and sexual rights, and she has been a lead researcher on projects related to child support, sexual harassment, sex work and family law in the Anglophone Caribbean. As part of the Panel ExCo, Tracy was jointly responsible for overseeing and guiding Phase 1 of the IPPF reform.

Dr. Sharman Stone

The Hon Dr. Sharman Stone BA (Hons), MA, Grad Dip Tertiary Ed, PhD, is a writer and human rights advocate, and was one of Australia’s longest serving women parliamentarians (1996-2016). As a champion of women’s rights, she focused on rural women and girls, those impacted by environmental disaster, and indigenous and migrant women’s rights. She organised the first Congolese refugee families’ resettlement in her country, and led the overturn of a Minister’s capacity to ban medical abortions and promoted special measures to increase women’s parliamentary representation. She chaired the Women’s Committee of the Asia-Pacific Parliamentarians for Population Development. In recognition of her long-standing commitment and international networks, Sharman was made Australia’s Global Ambassador for Women and Girls, 2017-2020. Working with governments, civil society, and INGOs across the Indo-Asia-Pacific, she promoted a more just and safe temporary migration experience for women, the addressing of unmet family planning needs, the elimination of violence against women, and reducing the poverty driving child marriage and modern slavery. Sharman has regularly represented her country’s equality agenda at the UN and elsewhere. Her academic work, seminal texts and curriculum development have advanced gender and inter-race relations. Sharman is the Patron of the Centre for Women Peace and Security at Monash University, has non-executive Board Directorship experience and training, and has been an independent advisor to the IPPF GC since 2018.

Dr. Esther Vicente

Esther is a human rights advocate, activist, and academic. She is a Professor of Law at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico Law Faculty, teaching courses on the International Protection of Human Rights, Feminist Jurisprudence, Family Law and Constitutional Law. From 2014 to 2019, she held an honorary position as Commissioner and Vice-President of the Civil Rights Commission of Puerto Rico. At present, she is the president of the feminist group INTER-MUJERES PUERTO RICO, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the study, research and advocacy of legal issues regarding women rights, human rights and gender. Esther published the book Beyond Law: Sex, Gender and Violence in Intimate Relationships, and has co-authored several books on women, SRHR, and the law. Esther was President of the IPPF Western Hemisphere Region for several years and served as delegate from that Region on the IPPF Governing Council. She currently chairs the IPPF Finance and Audit Committee.

Ms. Julia Bunting

Julia is the President of the Population Council and a global She Decides Champion. She is widely known for her path-breaking work on reproductive and maternal health during her 12-year tenure at the UK Department for International Development (DFID), where she oversaw the UK government’s international development policy on HIV and AIDS; maternal, newborn, and child health; sexual and reproductive health and rights; and population. She was a lead catalyst of the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning where national governments, donors, civil society, the private sector, and the research and development community came together to make commitments to enable an additional 120 million girls and women to have access to voluntary family planning information, services, and supplies by 2020. Julia has served on the boards of several global health partnerships, including the Health Metrics Network and the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, where she served as chair for four years. She currently serves on the Board of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, the FP2020 Reference Group, and Rutgers (the Dutch IPPF MA). In June 2013, Julia was awarded the honor of Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for improving reproductive health in developing countries. Before joining the Population Council, she served as IPPF’s Director, Programme and Technical.

Ms. Gunilla Carlsson

Gunilla is the Deputy Executive Director for Management and Governance for UNAIDS and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. In this capacity, she leads work to promote effective governance of UNAIDS, and she provides strategic direction to management functions in the areas of human resources, finance and budget, information and communication technology, and administration. Gunilla has a long history advancing women’s rights, health, and sustainable development in the international agenda, having participated in a high-level panel for global sustainability ahead of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil (2012), the United Nations High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the UNAIDS and Lancet Commission: Defeating AIDS—Advancing Global Health, and the World Bank High-Level Advisory Council on Women’s Economic Empowerment. She also served on the African Development Bank’s three-member High-Level Panel on Fragile States in 2013 and 2014, advising on strategies related to the Horn of Africa. She is an affiliated member of the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and has served as its Vice-Chair since June 2017. Born and raised in Sweden, Gunilla served as an elected member of the Swedish Parliament from 2002 to 2013, as the Minister for International Development Cooperation from 2006 to 2013, and as an elected member of the European Parliament from 1995 to 2002.

Ms. Aileen McColgan (ex-officio)

Aileen was appointed Honorary Legal Counsel to the IPPF in December 2019. She is a barrister who practises at 11 KBW, London, and is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds. Previously, she was Professor of Human Rights Law and Vice Dean of the Law School at King’s College London. She has specialised in human rights, anti-discrimination and gender equality law as an academic since 1991 and as a barrister since 2001. Aileen was the UK’s national expert on the EU’s network of legal experts on gender equality and non-discrimination until 2016. She is Chair of the UK’s Human Rights Lawyers Association and a member of the editorial committees of Public Law, European Human Rights Law Review, and the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law.