Crystal is the Director of Nawi: Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective, an organisation working on a Pan African feminist framing of macro level economics. Her career has revolved around themes of inequalities, including economic inequality and gender inequality, and has also involved work around data.
She previously served as Head of Advocacy and lead on Economic Justice at FEMNET, one of Africa’s largest women’s rights networks, with over 600 members in more than 45 African countries. She led FEMNET’s work to ensure that women from Africa have the capacity to articulate their issues through a Pan-African feminist macroeconomic lens and are meaningfully present in policy spaces.
Prior to working at FEMNET, she was as Policy Lead for the thematic area on international financial architecture at the Tax Justice Network Africa. Crystal’s duties included policy and advocacy work at a Pan-African level with governments, donors and organisational members and partners on tax justice issues on the continent. She has also worked for Hivos - East Africa where she served as both Programme Officer and Programme Development Manager. While at Hivos, Crystal worked in sub-national, national, and regional policy and partner management across both roles. This meant that she worked with private sector, government at all levels, journalists and researchers, as well as having a fundraising role.
She currently sits on the board of the Institute of Public Finance (IPF Kenya) and is a member of a number of reference groups related to gender and macroeconomic policy.
Crystal holds an MA in African studies with a focus on rural economic development from Dalarna University in Sweden, and a BBA in Business Management from Centria University of Applied Sciences in Finland.
Fighting for Africa at a global level is hard. Fighting for women’s rights in a patriarchal world is hard. Fighting for both of them together sometimes feels impossible. Despite this, the African women’s movement is never relenting and continuously fighting — clamouring through windows when doors are closed to them, and then opening the same doors for those who come after them. So many of these brave unrelenting women have gone before me; so many I see coming after me. I am in good company — and this gives me hope.Crystal Simeoni