Lydia Muthiani (Co-founder and Member)

Lydia Muthiani, is a human rights lawyer with over twelve (12) years’ experience, specializing in the advancement of women’s and girls’ human rights. For the past ten (10) years, Lydia has focused her career on the elimination of all forms of gender-based discrimination, especially undertaking advocacy and other actions aimed towards improving State and non-State actors’ prevention and response to gender-based violence and other violations of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Further, Lydia possesses expertise on pursuing access to justice and reparations for victims of human rights violations, including through strategic impact human rights litigation, the criminal justice system, and other transitional justice processes. She has dedicated the last ten (10) years on improving and facilitating the participation of victims and survivors of human rights violations in access to justice processes, having interacted with thousands of victims and personally interviewed over one thousand (1,000) victims of gross human rights violations.

Lydia has primarily undertaken this work in Kenya and the East African Sub-Region, but also supported similar work in various countries within the Latin America and Caribbean Region. In the varied tasks undertaken, she has gained crucial skills and experience in: strategic thinking and planning; program design, budgeting, implementation, oversight and management; planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning (“PMEL”); legal and field research; drafting of high-quality reports and documents; strategic impact human rights litigation; strategic advocacy and communications, including at the national, regional and international levels; capacity building and provision of expert technical assistance to State and non-State actors; legislative and policy design, development and review; and, partnership building and maintenance.

Lydia holds a Master of Studies in International Human Rights Law (MSt. IHRL) from the University of Oxford, a post-graduate diploma in legal studies (Dip. Law) from the Kenya School of Law, and a bachelor’s degree in law (LL. B) from the University of Nairobi.