Dr. Leena Koni Hoffmann is an Associate Fellow of the Africa Programme at Chatham House and leads the programme’s Social Norms and Accountable Governance (SNAG) project, which is the programme’s largest and longest-running research project on governance and corruption.

For over fifteen years, she has developed and contributed to research studies on political change and democratisation, informal institutions and drivers of corruption, security sector governance and reform, regional trade and cross-border dynamics in West Africa. She has critical experience in social network mapping; household surveys and social norms measurement; gender and social exclusion (GESI) analysis. She has extensive consultative experience with international institutions including the OECD, USAID, US State Department, World Bank, UN’s World Food Programme, and the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FDCO) and the National Research Fund of Luxembourg.

She has also travelled extensively across Africa and has in-country research experience across Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Kenya, and Senegal. She is also the scientific lead for the Citizen and Security Relations in West Africa Research Programme – funded by the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor – which is studying civil society and security institutions in Chad, the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal.

She is a member of Transparency International’s Advisory Council and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Global Evergreening Alliance. She hosts the OECD’s Sahel and West Africa Club’s podcast series, Women Leading Change, which spotlights transformational women who are business, thought and political leaders. From 2016 to 2020, she was a technical adviser to the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel. She was also a Marie Curie research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and an anti-corruption investigator at Nigeria’s Independent Commission for Corrupt Practices (ICPC). Dr Hoffmann holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology from the University of Jos, Nigeria, a master’s degree in International Relations from Lancaster University, UK, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in African Studies from the University of Birmingham, UK.