Jite Phido is a social and behavior change communication specialist with over twelve years of experience developing and implementing solutions for transformative development with communities across Nigeria. Her work centers participatory design and implementation methodologies and aims to amplify voice, participation, equity and substantive inclusion of traditionally underserved people in social transformation processes. She has worked on programs across themes of demand generation and service improvement in health, education equity and access, gender, climate change adaptation and sustainable and inclusive livelihoods, community-led approaches to tackling modern-day slavery, combatting violent extremism, conflict prevention and peace promotion.
Jite Phido is a senior program manager on the scaling innovations team at Results for Development (R4D), where she manages the equity and inclusion, and systems innovation thematic areas at R4D’s International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) secretariat. She additionally manages IDIA’s global innovation advisors program, a network of technical experts, thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and system disruptors from low- and middle-income countries who share IDIA’s priorities and objectives, and use their expertise and experience to improve IDIA’s work.
Throughout her career, Jite has focused on participatory approaches to development that leverage community participation and inclusion. She has designed media interventions that have reached over 25 million Nigerians across the country in six languages. Her multimedia policy research on the role of community health workers in driving equitable health access for the Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health at Scale project won an award from the Development Research and Projects Center in Nigeria. As a bridge fellow with the Nigeria Economic Summit Group, Jite was seconded as the technical assistant to the Women Affairs Thematic Working Group, supporting the federal Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development’s work mainstreaming gender equity and social inclusion in health, education, livelihoods and governance, into the federal government of Nigeria Medium Term National Development Plan (2021-2025), a historical first for a Nigerian national plan.
Prior to joining R4D, Jite was an Atlantic fellow for social and economic equity based at the London School of Economics’ International Inequalities Institute, where her focus of study was on gender equity and dominant media narratives and discourses around how marginalized people make claims and challenge power for a more just world. Before that, she was the program director at ARDA Development Communication Inc, a leading development communication non-profit based in Lagos, Nigeria, where she worked with local and international donors, partners, clients, government agents, civil society, and communities to design and produce radio programs, videos, distance learning toolkits, participatory theatre productions, print IECs, IVR solutions, and mobile applications that addressed Nigeria’s endemic inequalities through advocacy and by targeting barriers to systems change and increasing access to information, services, networks, and social inclusion.
Ms. Phido holds an M.Sc. in inequalities and social science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MPH in global maternal and child health from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and a B.A. in biology with a minor concentration in French from Clark University.
