Ledia Andrawes

Director, Innovation

Ledia Andrawes is a design anthropologist, strategist and innovation leader who integrates rigour with heart to reimagine more equitable social futures. Combining behavioural research, futures thinking, systems thinking, and participatory design, she helps people make sense of complexity, challenge entrenched assumptions and translate ambitious ideas into practical action. 

Ledia has led 30+ complex initiatives across 15 countries, working with communities, governments and organisations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Bank, WHO, UNICEF, ODI and Oxfam. While at ThinkPlace, she led innovation programs across Africa spanning health, financial inclusion and public services. She later co-founded Sonder Collective, scaling a global innovation practice spanning more than 70 collaborators.

Her work includes co-designing Kenya’s citizen-centred national health insurance strategy, shaping a more equitable immunisation supply chain strategy across more than 60 countries, and reimagining humanitarian and peacebuilding systems with practitioners and activists around the world. With the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ledia has delivered major global convenings on women’s leadership and gender equity in health, shaping evidence-based investment approaches, and co-creating the Designing for Impact at Scale toolkit to strengthen how lived experience shapes decisions. 

Mindful of how power and privilege shape outcomes, Ledia draws on participatory practice and Indigenous wisdom to ensure diverse perspectives meaningfully shape what comes next. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity, where her research examined the value of co-design for social change, as well as a Master of Business from RMIT and a Bachelor of Design from UTS. Her work has received the Core77 Design Award for Social Innovation, a Good Design Award and multiple DMI Design Value Awards.

The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we shape together, through courage to challenge the systems we have inherited, imagination to see what could exist instead, and the collective power to make those possibilities real.