Juanita Pardesi

Juanita Pardesi has more than 16 years’ experience working at local, national, regional and international levels in project design, development, management and evaluation. Before joining TIPS she was chief operations officer at the DFID-funded ComMark Trust – a grant-making agency aimed at supporting pro-poor, private sector development through implementing the “making markets work for the poor” approach.

Her portfolio at TIPS includes all governance and management tasks related to the operation of TIPS, as well as being responsible the Community Work Programme (CWP), which includes managing the transfer of the CWP from within TIPS to the Department of Cooperative Governance (DC0G). This includes providing extensive technical assistance to DCoG for overall programme management and reporting, including the design of relevant related frameworks and monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment indicators.

She has helped design and manage various projects including the Apparel Lesotho Alliance to Fight AIDS (ALAFA), the Lesotho Textiles and Apparel Training and Productivity Fund, and ComMark’s Regional Standards Trade Programme and Eastern Cape Red Meat Project. Her expertise includes financial management, capacity-building, translating strategy into operational objectives and activities, evaluating grant applications, drafting contracts, project assessment, due diligent audits, and assessing project risk.

She has an MBA from the University of South Africa in conjunction with the UK Open University.