Lucia Makamure

Lucia is a fiscal justice campaigner and a gender expert with over 15 years of experience in gender and fiscal justice, spanning across national, regional, and global civil society organisations. She is currently the Operations and Programme Quality Lead at the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs).

Until December 2023, she led the Debt Sustainability Portfolio for Open Society Africa, where she was responsible for grant making, project management, partnerships management and providing thought leadership on the foundation's interventions on sovereign debt in the African continent. In 2021-2022, Lucia represented Open Society Africa in the Working Group for the OSF Global Campaign on Debt and Green Recovery and served as a core member of the Debt Sustainability Initiative. She has also worked as an Economic Justice Lead at the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA), where she managed the Economic Justice Programme grants and provided leadership on the Economic and Climate Justice pathway of work for the organisation.

Before Open Society, Lucia served as the Gender Specialist at the Graca Machel Trust providing leadership and technical support to the organisation’s 16 country networks under the Women’s Economic and Social Advancement programme and as an Alliance and Partnerships Manager at Gender Links, where she coordinated a campaign that contributed to the review of the 2008 SADC Protocol on Gender and Development and led the research that was the foundation for the Africa Union Gender Strategy 2018-2027. She is also an experienced researcher who has co-authored seven editions of the SADC Gender Protocol Barometer, which provides up-to-date gender statistics and analysis that inform policy development in Southern Africa.

Lucia is a Commonwealth Scholar with an MA in Public Policy and Management from the University of York.