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Anj Handa is an equality, leadership and structural change expert whose work is driven by one clear belief: the world is not yet fair or safe for women, and meaningful progress requires systems to change, not simply individuals within them.
For more than 20 years, Anj has worked at the intersection of leadership, governance and social impact as a professional lobbyist, consultant, governance specialist, community builder and speaker. Her work challenges organisations, boards and institutions to rethink how power operates, who holds influence and whether decision making genuinely reflects the people most affected by it.
Anj is the Founder of Inspiring Women Changemakers, a community and consultancy working towards a world that is safer and fairer for women and other marginalised groups. Through her consultancy work, she supports leadership teams, boards and funders to create more inclusive and accountable structures, helping organisations move beyond performative inclusion towards meaningful systemic change.
Her authority is grounded in lived experience and real world impact. In 2014, Anj 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. Coordinating a leading legal team, engaging parliamentarians and global media, and building a petition supported by more than 126,000 people, the campaign ultimately succeeded. The experience gave her unique insight into how institutions operate and what it takes to influence them effectively.
Anj is one of fewer than 1% of Black and brown women in the UK holding governance roles at senior level. She has served as Chair of arts organisation Freedom Studios and as Independent Governor and Committee Chair at Leeds Arts University. Her work combines the perspective of someone who has worked within established systems with the determination to transform them.
A multilingual speaker with international experience, including diplomatic assignments and global team leadership, Anj is known for delivering thought provoking talks that connect lived experience with structural analysis. Her presentations are honest, insightful and practical, helping audiences move from awareness to action while maintaining warmth, hope and humanity.
Previous clients include Sky Business, GlaxoSmithKline, Vodafone, the National Health Service, CIMA, Chartered Management Institute and Innovate UK, alongside charities, universities and civil society organisations across the UK.
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 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.
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.
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.
We are very thankful to Anj for being a guest speaker at Wrigleys Solicitors’ Employment Law Conference for Charities. She is a highly professional and engaging speaker, and it was a pleasure to work with her. Anj knew her subject inside out, presenting on it with great passion and adapting her content to chime with the theme of our day and our delegates’ sector and circumstances
Anj was an absolute superstar, with a VERY short turnaround time Anj delivered a fantastic and tailored keynote at our International Women’s Day event. I’d highly recommend Anj and her approach to the glass ceiling. It was thought-provoking and really did fit the theme this year. Thanks for all your hard work and collaboration.
