Past Fellows
The Ibrahim Leadership Fellowship enabled me to put my policy-oriented research expertise into practice. I devised a pan-African migration and development agenda for the AfDB which positions the institution more strategically in contemporary debates about migration to, through and from Africa.
Robtel Neajai Pailey
Robtel Neajai Pailey
Country: Liberia
Current base: London, UK
Occupation: Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy
Organisation: The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Robtel is an academic, activist and author of the monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). For over 15 years, she has worked across a broad range of fields while supporting universities, governments, media institutions, multilateral, regional, non-governmental and community-based organisations in Africa, Europe and North America.
Robtel’s core areas of research and policy expertise include the political economy of development, migration, citizenship, conflict, post-war recovery and governance. She has conducted multi-sited fieldwork in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Denmark, Ghana, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, the UK and US.