Ailsa Holloway

Ailsa has had the privilege of a rich and varied experience in the fields of health, humanitarian assistance, and higher education. This reflects more than 30 years of multi-partner programme management in Asia, Middle East, and Africa, where she held both public health and international humanitarian assistance positions. These assignments included working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Thailand and Iraq, as well as consultancies for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva and Sudan, along with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Sudan and Namibia. Ailsa was also the disaster preparedness advisor for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in southern Africa, based in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Ailsa brings more than 25 years focused on establishing formal and non-formal capacity development programmes in disaster risk reduction and emergency management in Africa and the Pacific. In South Africa (first at the University of the Western Cape, then the University of Cape Town, followed by Stellenbosch University), she established the Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme (DiMP), to introduce disaster risk scholarship in Africa, and then RADAR (the Research Alliance for Disaster and Risk Reduction). Her involvement was also reflected in the establishment of ‘Periperi U’ in 2006 that has successfully scaled disaster risk-related scholarship across Africa. Ailsa was centrally involved in the reform of South Africa’s disaster management legislation and has co-authored several books on disaster risk reduction. 

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Ailsa is Auckland University of Technology’s postgraduate Public Health programme coordinator. She also teaches and supervises students through AUT's Disaster Risk Management and Development programme. Ailsa holds a DrPH from the University of California Los Angeles and an MA from the University of Washington, Seattle.