Hayley Welgus

Hayley graduated from UNC in 2018 with a Master of Public Health in health behavior as a Rotary Peace Fellow. Through her Fellowship and MPH studies, Hayley focused on issues of gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, community-based participatory research.

After first setting off into the world as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Belgium in 2003, Hayley has gone on to work in a range of local and international organizations in Australia, UK, US, Thailand, China, Cambodia, and Haiti. She previously worked as a gender specialist for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Phnom Penh, where she helped inform WFP’s understanding of gender power dynamics in relation to social protection assistance, and managed gender mainstreaming efforts. She also worked for local women’s organizations in Southeast Asia for several years in areas such as the documentation of labor conditions of Burmese women migrants in China, and support for sex workers and survivors of human trafficking and sexual abuse in Cambodia. She also worked to develop protection standards for organizations working with sexually exploited and vulnerable women and children. Prior to this, Hayley was based in London where she worked for Amnesty International UK in their Brand and Events unit, then later for Amnesty’s Individuals At Risk team. She spent the summer of 2017 with Save the Children US for her AFE, based between DC and Haiti, where she led the roll-out of Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks for a new family planning and post-abortion care program in Haiti.

Hayley also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies from Flinders University, Australia, and a certificate in women’s human rights law from the London School of Economics. She is currently based in Southeast Asia, and works as a freelance consultant on gender and health equity issues.