Dr Linda Mayoux is an international consultant who has worked on gender mainstreaming and women’s empowerment through enterprise development since 1980s for DFID, UNIFEM, ILO, UNIDO, Aga Khan Foundation, Asian Development Bank, World Bank, IFAD, USAID, SDC and many NGOs in South Asia, Africa and Latin America.

She is the originator of the Gender Action Learning System/Gender Action Learning for Sustainability at Scale methodologies, starting with pictorial participatory planning and assessment tools as part of her development of guides and resources as principal research for DfID’s Enterprise Development Impact Assessment Information Service. As Particpatory Action Learning System, she piloted and further developed PALS in Uganda with Kabarole Research and Resource Centre, Trickle Up US, MFIs in Pakistan and ANANDI in India. This included most of the main tools that in 2007 she brought to Oxfam Novib/IFAD’s WEMAN as GALS – a specifically gender-focused methodology for organisations, communities, households and individuals was developed with Bukonzo Joint and GreenHome in Uganda, Thies Reemer and other Oxfam partners and consultants. She further developed GALS with TWIN-UK, Nestle, SNV (PALS), Hivos (GALSatScale) and IFAD’s RWEE programme. This included development of the ‘Growing the Diamond Forest’ GALS value chain manual. As continuation of her earlier work on gender and micro-finance, she developed Financial Action Learning System (FALS) with IFAD and Oikocredit and partners in Philippines as a financially sustainable client empowerment methodology integrated into socially responsible finance.

She has extensive experience in workshop facilitation, research and evaluation and many publications both journal and on-line.

She has a PhD specialising in gender and development from Cambridge UK in Social and Political Science (1982) and a diploma majoring in Business Studies and Leadership with Open University UK (2011). She is currently in the final year of a degree in Visual Communications with Open College of the Arts, covering graphic design, book design, photography, illustration and animation.

She designed and manages a number websites including:

https://www.gamechangenetwork.org where she posts manuals on GALS and other related GAMEChange empowerment methodologies and experiences of organisations she works with.

https://viscom4dev.zemniimages.info currently a blog for one of her OCA degree modules on approaches to animation to be developed in future to cover other aspects of her work on pictorial methodologies and infographics.