Winfred Nakandi leads Malkia Africa Network's Policy Arm: overseeing the design, execution, and quality of Malkia's research agenda, the rigour of its policy outputs, and the strategic engagement of the policymakers, legislative bodies, and international organisations through which Malkia's evidence is converted into change.

Nakandi's track record spans policy engagement, evidence-based advocacy, and institutional framework development across the women's rights and governance landscape in Africa. Her analytical focus on gender equality within institutional governance structures is the intellectual backbone of Malkia's work on women's civic and individual rights.

As Policy and Research Lead, Winfred holds end-to-end accountability for Malkia's research quality and policy influence strategy. Her responsibilities span the full pipeline from research conception to policy impact.

• Designing Malkia's research agenda to target the structural legal and regulatory barriers most consequential to women's civic and individual rights across Africa.
• Overseeing the execution of policy research and ensuring that outputs meet the methodological standards required for credible engagement with legislative bodies and international organisations.
• Leading Malkia's strategic engagement with policymakers, reform networks, and the international institutions through which evidence-to-influence conversion occurs.
• Maintaining the analytical integrity that distinguishes Malkia's policy outputs from advocacy campaigns, ensuring that every recommendation is grounded in evidence, not position.

This boundary function is critical to the integrity of Malkia's hybrid model. A Policy Arm that generates research disconnected from field realities produces analysis that policymakers cannot trust. A Field Lab that generates evidence without a clear pathway to policy use produces documentation that never reaches the institutions with power to act on it. Winfred's role is to ensure neither failure mode occurs; that the evidence pipeline and the policy pipeline remain connected, disciplined, and mutually reinforcing.

In her capacity as a Board of Trustees member, Winfred provides governance oversight on Malkia's research strategy, policy positioning, and the institutional standards that protect the credibility of its analytical outputs. Her presence on the Board ensures that research quality is not only an operational priority but a governance commitment, embedded in how Malkia is held accountable at the highest institutional level.