At the end of 2021, LIN was awarded an $8 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor to promote safe and healthy workplaces in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This opportunity also gave us the chance to grow the LIN team, and we are excited to announce our newest addition, Zaira Zavala.
We sat down with Zaira to learn more about her background and the work she will be helping LIN accomplish.
1) Zaira, welcome to the team! Tell us a bit about your background in development, academia, health, and human rights.
Thank you very much for the welcome.
My professional path in development and social rights goes back a few years, in an anthropological research center, studying the relation between poverty and international migration, 20 years ago. I lived for several weeks in the poorest communities in my country, México, conducting in-depth interviews with families, trying to understand their systemic poverty. As you can imagine, that marked me deeply, and since then I have tried to focus my academic training and professional activities working with and for populations in situations of vulnerability: four years in academic research on poverty and vulnerability, centered in gender development, also participating on evaluation of education, health and nutrition policy programs; six years directing and evaluating social policy programs in the Mexican government; and the last five years mainly in the coordination of Sustainable Development projects with a gender perspective on civil organizations in Spain, where I currently live. In the meantime I studied 2 másters (Social Anthropology, and Public Administration) and 1 phd (in Government and public administration).
2) How did you first learn about the work of La Isla Network?
A friend of mine told me about a project that was being planned in the sugar industry near Guadalajara, my hometown. He told me about the effects on the health of workers, especially kidney disease. It was a very interesting and promising project, and that is how I found out about the type of work carried out by La Isla Network.
3) What role will you be performing with LIN?
I will be in charge of the monitoring and evaluation office, helping to ensure that activities are carried out as planned so that the expected results are achieved. I see this office as a support space for the collection, processing, reporting and analysis of our activities, which will allow the people involved in the execution and decision-making of the project to verify that we are doing as much as possible to achieve our objectives, with the best results.
4) La Isla Network is an international organization with members all around the world. What part of the world will you be working from? Tell us something interesting about where you are.
I will be working from the city of Granada, a very small city in the south of Spain, which is famous because it is where Christopher Columbus obtained the financing for that trip that cemented the relations that America and Europe have today. Today it is an interesting city with many features of the Arab world, reminiscent of the influence of Al-Andalus.
5) What are you most looking forward to in this new position?
I hope to learn a lot from the work carried out by La Isla Network for the health and safety of workers. The experience previously carried out in the Adelante Initiative in Nicaragua is inspiring, because the results obtained have a very evident impact on workers’ health, and were achieved in a very short time. The opportunity to replicate that experience in more countries, and contribute to improving these workers’ conditions with prevention and protection systems is exciting.
6) What impact do you hope to make through your work?
I am motivated to work in an inter-institutional way to improve the living conditions of the population and to contribute to lasting community-based solutions to social problems.
Now to the difficult questions:
7) What languages do you speak?
I’m spanish speaker, and trying to be bilingual with english
8) What does the perfect breakfast look like to you?
Oh my god, chilaquiles with green sauce!
9) Top book you read last year?
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, I hadn’t read it before and it’s fantastic.
10) If you had your own talk show, who would you invite as your first guest?
It would definitely be a show to listen to powerful and humanitarian women voices, maybe Malala Yousafzai
11) Where is your happy place?
An idyllic image of a house with an ocean view, but I can also be very happy in the garden with my family and my dogs.
Thanks for participating, Zaira!
La Isla Network is lucky to have strong and accomplished members like Zaira on our team. If you’re interested in the work we do and want to find out about open roles currently being offered at LIN, visit our careers tab.
