Kate Molesworth

Kate Molesworth matriculated in 1984 and graduated with an MSc in Biological Anthropology. She commenced a DPhil, but left to set up and lead a research project on resilience and coping mechanisms among remote and marginalised Nepalese communities for Glasgow University. After two years in the hills of Nepal, Kate moved to Kathmandu, where she worked for UNICEF’s Health and Nutrition Unit, chaired the development of the 1992 Breastmilk Substitutes Act, and witnessed the beginning of the democratic movement and decade-long insurgency. She has returned many times to Nepal throughout the civil war and subsequent peace building, most memorably as Health Adviser to the EU Conflict Mitigation Package, which assessed the needs of an estimated 60,000 men, women and children released from bonded labour. She returned to the UK for a few years, working in documentary making for Channel 4, and as a Lecturer in Anthropology at Durham University, where she wrote her doctoral thesis.

Since 1997, Kate has lived in Switzerland, employed first by the Development Study Group at Zürich University. She is currently Health and Social Development Adviser at the Swiss Centre for International Health at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) where she focuses on community empowerment for health, access to essential services, social inclusion, gender equity, sexual and reproductive health and rights, communicable and non-communicable disease prevention and pandemic responses (HIV and COVID-19), both in the development and humanitarian contexts across, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America.  She has led a number of multilateral evaluations including the World Food Programme HIV and AIDS Thematic Evaluation; the Evaluation of the UN System-wide Work Programme for Scaling-up HIV Services for Populations of Humanitarian Concern, and has written policy on health promotion, disease prevention and school health.

Since 2011, she has led the Health Promotion component of the Swiss Health Promotion and System Strengthening project in Tanzania, supporting the government in piloting systematic approaches and policy development to guide participatory health promotion and community action for health.  She leads the Swiss TPH Backstopping Mandate to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Technical Support to the Government of Norway.  She is currently Co-Lead of the Rapid Review of the World Bank support of the global COVID-19 response.