Kate Molesworth

Kate Molesworth matriculated in 1985 and graduated with an MSc in Biological Anthropology. She commenced a DPhil but left to set up and lead a research project on resilience and coping mechanisms among remote and marginalised Nepalese communities for Glasgow University. After two years in the hills of Nepal, Kate moved to Kathmandu, where she worked for UNICEF’s Health and Nutrition Unit, chaired the development of the 1992 Breastmilk Substitutes Act, and witnessed the beginning of the democratic movement and decade-long insurgency. She has returned many times to Nepal throughout the civil war and subsequent peace building, most memorably as Health Adviser to the EU Conflict Mitigation Package, which assessed the needs of an estimated 60,000 men, women and children released from bonded labour. She returned to the UK for a few years, working in documentary making for Channel 4, and as a Lecturer in Anthropology at Durham University, where she wrote her doctoral thesis.

Since 1997, Kate has lived in Switzerland, working first with the Development Study Group at Zürich University on projects in Nepal. She recently became an independent adviser after 18 years with the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH where she was Health and Social Development Adviser focussing on community empowerment for health, access to essential services, social inclusion, sexual and reproductive health and rights, HIV, communicable and non-communicable disease prevention and pandemic responses, both in the development and humanitarian contexts across, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. She led a number of multilateral evaluations including the World Food Programme HIV and AIDS Thematic Evaluation; the Evaluation of the UN System-wide Work Programme for Scaling-up HIV Services for Populations of Humanitarian Concern, and the Rapid Review of the World Bank support of the global COVID-19 response. She written policy on health promotion, disease prevention and school health.

Between 2011and 2022, she led the Health Promotion component of the Swiss Health Promotion and System Strengthening project in Tanzania, supporting the government in piloting systematic approaches and policy development to guide participatory health promotion and community action for health. She led the Swiss TPH Backstopping Mandate providing technical advice to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. She was also the lead adviser of the mandate providing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Technical Support to the Government of Norway.

She is a founding board member of the Swiss Center for Design and Health and a trustee of the Calcutta Project which provides clinical services, outreach and child safeguarding to sex workers and their children via Basel University Hospital.