Abigail

Donner

Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Director

Abigail Donner is a public health and diversity professional with more than 16 years of experience advancing equity as a key programmatic outcome. Her equity experience includes programming across the global health space, with particular emphasis on the needs of women and girls. Donner is a master trainer on gender equality and social inclusion who builds capacity across Abt’s portfolio for an intersectional approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). Her expertise also includes strategic and operational planning and program design and delivery. She has worked with implementing agencies and academic and research institutions in more than a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Working closely with the Chief Global Equity Officer, Donner leads EDI work across Abt. She founded and led the first company-wide equity initiative in 2013. She now leads a team that creates evidence-based tools and approaches to measure and mitigate disparities in gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other social determinants of inclusion. In addition, Donner has built a global network of Abt gender focal points, a resource library for projects and proposals, and a range of curricula used by Abt teams. Donner partners with internal stakeholders to align Abt’s project-based and internal equity work.

Previously, Donner managed a range of global health service delivery programs at Abt, all with an emphasis on equity. Donner was the technical program manager for VectorLink Tanzania and VectorLink Rwanda, overseeing programs totaling $22 million a year to provide malaria protection for 3.7 million people, including Rwandans, Tanzanians, and refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Before coming to Abt, she worked under Majid Ezzati at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Among other tasks, she coordinated the Nutrition Impact Model Study, a Gates Foundation project to estimate global levels and trends of maternal and child under-nutrition. The Lancet published this work. As program coordinator and monitoring and evaluation consultant for Mass General/Brigham, she coordinated a program to reduce disparities and decrease time from screening to diagnosis for breast and cervical cancer among low-income women.

Expertise:

Program management
Program design
Gender equality and social inclusion
Global health
Vector control
Capacity building
Gender mainstreaming
Health disparities
Social determinants of health

Key Projects:

Zika AIRS Project: Jamaica
PMI VectorLink Project
PMI AIRS Project
Health Finance and Governance Project
Nutrition Impact Model Study (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)
Global Burden of Disease Project (Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health)

Publications:

Mwansa P, Bayoh M, Mumba P, Iwuchukwu N, Zulu R, George K, Belemvire A, Donner A, Tammaro M, de Geir N, Ambrose K (2019) “Assessment of the Effect of Increased Women’s Participation on IRS Operations in Zambia”, Poster presentation at the South African Malaria Research Conference, Pretoria, South Africa.
Donner AD, Belemvire A, Johns B, Mangam K, Fiekowsky E, Gunn J, Hayden M, Ernst K. Equal Opportunity, Equal Work: Increasing Women’s Participation in the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative Africa Indoor Residual Spraying Project. Global Health: Science and Practice 2017. Published online December 2017.
Stevens GA, Finucane MM, Paciorek CJ, Flaxman SR, White RA, Donner AD, Ezzati M. Trends in mild, moderate, and severe stunting and underweight, and progress towards MDG1 in 141 developing countries: a systematic analysis of population representative data. Lancet 2012. Published online 4 July 2012.
Donner, A., Bruce, K. & R. Killian (2008) “Barriers to Compliance with Quality of Care Standards in Ghana”, Oral presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, San Diego.