Isabella Leyh

Isabella Leyh is a humanitarian research, evaluation and coordination specialist with over eight years of experience supporting evidence-based, accountable and locally led crisis response, with a thematic focus on accountability to affected people, localisation and PSEA. She combines field-based coordination with applied research to support senior leadership and inter-agency structures in decision-making, strengthen collective planning around community priorities and advocate alongside civil society organisations for their participation in humanitarian processes.

With UN OCHA in the Central African Republic, she led AAP and localisation working groups and supported IASC PSEA coordination structures. With Ground Truth Solutions, she led participatory research on community perspectives and delivered capacity-building to help organisations translate community feedback into practical change. She has also contributed to UN OCHA’s mixed-method evaluation on Accountability to Affected People and led regional case studies for DG ECHO’s greening humanitarian aid policy evaluation.

She is a member of the ZIF humanitarian expert pool affiliated with the German Federal Foreign Office and holds an MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA in Politics and History from the University of Manchester. She works in English, French, and German.