Annabel Erulkar

Annabel Erulkar, PhD, is a social scientist with 30 years’ experience in research and program innovations for adolescents and youth, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. She is a global leading expert on child marriage, child domestic work, migration, and trafficking. She has worked in Population Council offices in Kenya, Ghana, and Ethiopia and opened Population Council offices in both Nigeria and Ethiopia. She was Country Director in the Population Council’s office in Ethiopia for 17 years, during which the office received numerous awards and recognition for its groundbreaking work on child marriage and child domestic work. She is currently leading research and intervention development on trafficking of vulnerable populations for begging in Ethiopia, a groundbreaking study on this hidden form of human trafficking.

Annabel has testified in UK Parliament on child marriage and hosted learning tours for Melinda Gates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai, Mary Robinson, Gro Brundtland, and numerous parliamentarians and congressmen. Annabel was the principal investigator for the Berhane Hewan child marriage prevention program, which won UNFPA’s Best Practice for Adolescents and Youth, and cited by the US First Lady Michelle Obama.

She has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, reports, and briefs on the adolescent experience in sub-Saharan Africa, and led numerous studies across sub-Saharan Africa including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. She holds an MSc in Population Sciences from Harvard University and a PhD in Social Statistics from the University of Southampton, UK.