Emily Usher Shrair

As Head of Development, Emily leads the delivery of Girls Not Brides’ donor engagement and fundraising strategy, forging new strategic partnerships and collaborating across the Girls Not Brides secretariat to grow and diversify funding. Additionally, she shapes and supports influencing that aims to mobilise funding commitments to the wider 'adolescent girls' and 'ending child marriage' movements, including and beyond Girls Not Brides members.

A fundraising and gender specialist with seventeen years of experience in the sector, Emily has led fundraising, programme design, and communications for international gender equality organisations including CARE, the European Women’s Lobby and the Women’s Refugee Commission. She has deep activist roots and has worked throughout Central and Latin America and Europe with feminist social movements and women-led organisations on the promotion of sexual and reproductive health and rights, elimination of gender-based violence, and LGBTQUI+ rights. She received her MA in Gender and Development from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex on a US State Department Fulbright Scholarship and holds BA in International Relations and Gender Studies from Mount Holyoke College.

Emily lives in Brighton, UK, where she enjoys spending time on the beach with her family. She speaks English, Spanish and Italian.