Twenty-five years between the research and the practice, mostly in Tanzania.
Kate McAlpine is a scholar-practitioner working on child protection, gender and governance across East Africa and the UK. Her practice sits deliberately between two worlds: rigorous enough to publish, close enough to the ground to be useful.
She began in Tanzania in the 2000s, surveying children living on the streets of Arusha, Kilimanjaro and Mwanza. That work produced the finding that has shaped everything since: children who had stopped attending school faced close to eight times the odds of ending up permanently on the street. Prevention, it turned out, belonged further upstream than anyone was working.
Her doctorate at Fielding Graduate University, completed in 2015, set out a theory of responsible citizenship: an account of how an ordinary person comes to do the right thing for a child who is not their own, and a practical theory of change built on it.
She founded Citizens 4 Change, a social lab building a critical mass of citizen child protectors across East Africa, and co-created ConnectGo, a platform helping purpose-led organisations evidence and improve their social outcomes. Her clients span government agencies, funders and philanthropists, research bodies and community builders.
Credentials and affiliations
The Kipnes award funded research into the nature, prevalence and changing dynamics of protective social norms in Tanzania and Uganda.
Companies Kate founded
Citizens 4 Change and ConnectGo are independent organisations with their own teams, branding and websites. Kate founded both.
