Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Elizabeth Donger is a research associate at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. She has expertise in child protection, distress migration, climate change, land rights and access to justice. Her projects at Harvard FXB have covered the health and wellbeing of adolescent refugees living in urban areas of Ecuador and Zambia; community based approaches in India to the prevention of child labor, child marriage, trafficking and school dropout; global legal and policy frameworks for protection of children on the move; the implications of seasonal migration on child protection and rights; and rescue and reintegration policy for children trafficked for labor exploitation. Dedicated to advocacy focused research and policy engagement, her work has a strong focus on local and national dissemination following publication. Her research has been funded by UNHCR, UNICEF, the Harvard Global Institute, the Harvard School of Public Health and Tata Trusts.

Before Harvard FXB, Elizabeth worked for a law firm in London on cases of sex discrimination and land rights, a Colombian women's rights nonprofit supporting IDPs, and the legal empowerment nonprofit Namati, where she conducted a research project on global trends in land dispossession that she later presented at the World Bank. She holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was a John F Kennedy Fellow. She was awarded the Human Rights and International and Global Affairs class day awards for her thesis that provided background research on the sale of children for labor exploitation to the UN Special Rapporteur on Sale of Children.