Margaret Gichanga, PhD, is a policy researcher and governance specialist with over twelve years of experience across Africa and the United Kingdom. Her work spans evidence-based policy research, multi-stakeholder partnership design, and the translation of complex evidence into advocacy and strategic decision-making for government, donor, and international audiences.
Margaret holds a PhD in Business and Management from Oxford Brookes University, completed in 2024 on a fully funded Global Challenges Research Fund scholarship. Her doctoral research took an interdisciplinary approach, applying business and management theories to examine how state and non-state actors in complex security environments build trust, negotiate roles, and sustain collective action across multi-stakeholder partnerships. This innovative application of business scholarship to peace and security dynamics produced original insights into the governance conditions that determine whether partnerships across divergent institutional mandates succeed or fail. She also holds a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand, with earlier research focused on post-conflict security sector reform in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Her professional background includes senior roles in policy research and programme management in South Africa, teaching at Imperial College London Business School, and voluntary governance leadership on the Oxford Brookes Migration and Refugee Research Network, where she convenes expertise on the Horn of Africa humanitarian and migration landscape. In 2026, she joined a South Africa-based technology start-up working to embed child safety into the design of digital products, contributing as a fundraising consultant to support the organisation’s growth.
Her work advances research and policy initiatives at the intersection of peace, security, and community resilience across Africa. She is particularly interested in contributing to the theoretical and policy frameworks that shape peace and security in the Horn of Africa region, and in advancing evidence-based approaches to governance and conflict resolution that centre African perspectives and expertise. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.