Keeya-Lee Ayre leads global marketing and communications for the GSMA Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme, a 15.5 million GBP (28.2 million AUD) partnership with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), working to accelerate the delivery and impact of digital humanitarian assistance. She is responsible for the creative direction and dissemination of all content including digital campaigns, blogs, video, infographics and other multimedia outputs, as well as presence at events such as Mobile World Congress Barcelona.
Keeya has interned in strategic communications at the United Nations OCHA in New York, worked on projects in London, Rwanda, Malawi, Tanzania, and co-founded award-winning Australian non-profit organisation Perth SOUP. Keeya also qualified to practice Australian migration law in 2014 and has provided pro bono assistance to refugees since.
Keeya is also a former Huffington Post contributor, World Economic Forum Global Shaper and TEDx speaker. Her work has been showcased at the United Nations General Assembly and the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, among other high-level global events.
You can connect with Keeya-Lee on LinkedIn or keep up-to-date through her website and via Twitter.
UWA and me
UWA gave me an incredible start to my professional journey. One thing I often reflect on is how privileged and fortunate I was to have time as an undergraduate to dedicate the majority of my time to thinking, critiquing and challenging ideas. I am particularly indebted to UWA’s anthropology department, which greatly impacted who I am as a person. The anthropological training I received continues to positively influence me in my work, particularly when employing participatory storytelling methods and working with vulnerable people in humanitarian contexts.
Advocacy and storytelling
I am extremely passionate about effective cross-sector partnerships, research and using evidence to bring dignified, commercially-viable digital humanitarian assistance to vulnerable and underserved people. While I was at UN OCHA, I realised that even the most incredible research lacks meaning if it isn’t effectively communicated to the right people. This is what led me to my work in advocacy and storytelling, a field I hope to continue to grow in so that I can help causes and organisations I am passionate about achieve their goals.
Creating a digital humanitarian future
I am extremely privileged in my role at the GSMA Mobile for Humanitarian Innovation programme to work with an amazing team of passionate, skilled people to accelerate the delivery and impact of digital humanitarian assistance. We are on track to reach 7 million people with improved access to and use of life-enhancing mobile-enabled services during humanitarian and disaster preparedness, response and recovery by early 2022.
Dignified humanitarian storytelling
I recently led a participatory storytelling project with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Innovation Service, with Venezuelan refugees and migrants in Barranquilla, Colombia. We asked these individuals to tell us about the importance of mobile connectivity in their lives. They shared their own stories using the medium of their choice, with control over creative direction and narrative. When developing this project, we started with a simple question: how can we best support displaced people to share their own stories, with their own creative control, and use our platforms to amplify these? We have openly discussed the process behind this project, and the need for increased agency and ownership of people’s stories. I’ve recently joined the Dignified Storytelling Alliance, and am enthusiastically carrying on this work, trying to help humanitarian storytelling become meaningfully inclusive, and shift communications power away from head offices to affected people themselves.
Words of wisdom
Don’t try to have all the answers right now, the world you’re going to spend most of your career embedded in doesn’t exist yet. Different types of jobs are being created and dissolved all around us, all the time. My main advice to students is to focus on skills, and to understand your own personality and core motivations. What are you passionate about? What can you do well? What do you absolutely loathe? Are you currently trying to swim with, or against, your own current? Why? If you remain focused on who you are, and what you bring to the table, you’ll be to apply those skills to a wide range of scenarios and issues you are interested in for a lifetime.
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