Anj Handa

Anj Handa Speaker, Systems Change & Governance Specialist 

The world is not yet fair or safe for women. That is not a background statistic. It is the reason Anj Handa does everything she does.

For over 20 years, Anj Handa has worked at the intersection of equality, leadership and structural change: as a professional lobbyist, governance specialist, consultant, community builder and speaker.

Her work is grounded in a single, unfashionable conviction: that women’s inequality is not a pipeline problem or a cultural inconvenience. It is a structural failure, reproduced through the design of organisations, boards and institutions that were not built with women in mind, and have not been adequately redesigned since.

Anj is the Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers (IWC), a community and consultancy working toward a world that is safer and fairer for women and other marginalised people. Her consultancy work supports boards, leadership teams and funders to make decisions differently: to examine who holds authority, whose experience informs strategy, and whether the people most affected by decisions have genuine influence over them.

Her authority is grounded in practice. In 2014, she led a high-profile legal and media campaign on behalf of a woman and her two daughters facing deportation and the risk of Female Genital Mutilation. She assembled a top legal team, coordinated a petition that gathered 126,500 signatures, and engaged global media and parliamentarians. The campaign succeeded. It also taught her exactly how power moves through institutions, and what it takes to redirect it.

Anj is one of fewer than 1% of Black and brown women in the UK holding governance roles at senior level, having served as Chair of arts organisation Freedom Studios and as Independent Governor and Committee Chair at Leeds Arts University. She brings both the fluency of someone who has worked inside those rooms and the clarity of someone committed to changing them.

She is multilingual, with German as her second language, and has worked with global teams and on diplomatic assignments. Her talks are known for connecting lived experience to structural analysis in a way that moves mixed audiences from insight to action, without ever losing warmth, rigour or hope.

Previous clients include Sky Business, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, the NHS, CIMA, the Chartered Management Institute, Innovate UK, Leeds Beckett University and EGN, as well as charities, funders and civil society organisations across the UK.

SPEAKING TOPiCS

Who’s Missing, and What It Costs

When women, and particularly women whose identities compound that exclusion, are consistently absent from leadership, it is not only a fairness failure. It is a design failure. This keynote makes the structural case for women’s representation from the impact outward: what happens to decision-making quality, risk assessment, organisational culture and long-term resilience when the people closest to the issues are furthest from the decisions. Honest about the barriers. Clear about what better looks like. Designed to leave audiences with a compelling picture of what becomes possible, not just what is currently missing.

The Labyrinth, Not the Ceiling

The glass ceiling is the wrong metaphor, and it has been pointing organisations in the wrong direction for decades. The barriers women navigate are not one dramatic obstacle at the top. They are a complex, intersecting set of structural and cultural conditions that operate at every level, and they affect different women differently depending on race, disability, age and other factors. This keynote names those conditions clearly, examines what organisations are inadvertently building in, and shows what a better-designed route looks like. Grounded in Anj’s own experience of navigating institutions as a British Indian woman in governance, and in two decades of practice helping organisations see what they have designed without noticing.

Collective Power: How Changemakers Move the World

Rooted in the founding story of IWC and two decades of watching what happens when people bring their skills, networks and courage together in service of a shared purpose. This talk is about the practical and political power of collective action: how to build coalitions across difference, how to use narrative to shift power, and why the most important thing any changemaker can do is stop working alone. Story-rich, energising and designed to leave people with a clearer sense of their own capacity to contribute, and of the community of people doing this work alongside them.

Leading Through Backlash: Staying Brave, Strategic and Well

For leaders and changemakers navigating a political and cultural moment in which progressive values are being actively contested. Draws on Anj’s own experience of leading high-profile campaigns under pressure, and on two decades of observing what sustains movements and what burns them out. Practical, honest and grounded in what people are actually facing right now. This is not a talk about resilience as self-management. It is a talk about strategy, community and the long game. The tone is not defiant. It is steady, clear and full of hope for what sustained collective effort can achieve.

CONFERENCE HOSTING

Anj is an experienced conference host and moderator with a track record of holding complex, multi-perspective conversations with clarity and purpose. She is particularly sought for events where the subject matter requires a facilitator who can navigate difficult dynamics with both warmth and rigour.

Previous conferences include Disorienting Race by Carnegie School of Education, annual conferences of grantmaker Rosa Fund and domestic abuse charity IDAS, and leadership events across the corporate and civil society sectors.

You can follow Anj on her Substack