Celia Petty
Co-founder and Director of Operations
Celia is a co-founder of Evidence for Development and collaborated closely with John Seaman in the development of household economy assessment methods. She has worked extensively at an international policy level on the protection of children in situations of armed conflict, and on social protection and social policy issues affecting children.
Celia’s career history includes senior policy and research roles in Save the Children UK, work as a staff researcher at the Imperial War Museum, and lecturing in inner London schools and community education programmes. Academic awards include a Wellcome Research Scholarship, a Leverhume Research Fellowship and an Honorary Research Fellowship from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Celia studied history at Oxford University and has a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her publications include work on famine and food security, livelihood assessment and analysis, social policy and youth justice in developing countries, and the impact of armed conflict on children.
She has been a member of various UK and international committees and technical groups, including Comic Relief’s International Grants Committee, and has served on the boards of the charities Hope and Homes for Children and PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools).
Celia is Strategic Lead (Livelihoods) at the Walker Institute, University of Reading, and supervises PhD students at King’s College London and at the University of Reading.
Selected EfD blog posts
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16th June 2023
Can Machine Learning be used to help rural communities adapt to Climate Change?
William Shields, Celia Petty & Dai Clegg Evidence-for-Development (EfD) aims to reduce poverty by improving the quality and effectiveness of livelihood information available to decision makers at every level, from local to global, and to researchers working across multiple disciplines . Focusing currently on sub-Saharan Africa, EfD combines high tech innovation with on-the-ground experience. We...
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5th October 2017
Considering the health sector as an important user of Hydromet information
In September, I was able to attend the AMCOMET, African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology, forum in Addis Ababa. The focus of the forum was Weather, Water, and Climate Services, and the contribution of these ‘hydromet’ services to wider social and economic development is becoming increasingly evident as the reality of climate change hits both urban...
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28th September 2016
Measuring resilience to climate change in the Lake Victoria basin
Just over a year ago the UK Department for International Development (DfID), with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched its ‘Future Climate for Africa’ (FCFA) project. This £20 million project, involving five research consortia, aims to “generate fundamentally new climate science focused on Africa, and to ensure that this science has an impact on...