Senior Associate

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Jessica Backman-Levy is Senior Associate at Iris Group. Jessica has served as gender lead on projects in Ethiopia and Jordan. She has also provided technical assistance on gender assessments in the Dominican Republic and Cote d’Ivoire, and she has collaborated with partners to develop gender syllabi and training materials. Most notably, Jessica has introduced an innovative tool to address gender inequality in Jordan. Known as group model building, this approach brings community members together to define a problem, identify feedback mechanisms causing the problem, and generate and model ways to solve the problem.

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Jessica worked on projects as an independent consultant with MEASURE Evaluation, Palladium, and Ipas. Jessica also is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. She co-founded and sits on the board of The Minga Foundation, a small non-profit that partners with community-based organizations to improve socioeconomic conditions and health equity among vulnerable populations. Jessica earned her PhD and MPH from the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health and a BA in Psychology and Neuroscience from Smith College in Northampton, MA.