Georgetown Center for Global Health Policy & Politics welcomes leading fiscal law expert Professor Attiya Waris as Senior Scholar

DECEMBER 3 2025, WASHINGTON D.C. — The Georgetown Center for Global Health Policy & Politics is pleased to announce that Professor Attiya Waris has joined as a senior scholar, through a grant from the Ford Foundation.

“We are honored to welcome Professor Waris and to benefit from her expertise as one of the world’s foremost authorities on tax, governance, and human rights,” said Dr. Matthew M. Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy & Politics. “Her cutting-edge work at the vital intersection of fiscal justice and health equity is at the center of many of the most
important debates of our times.”

Professor Waris serves as the United Nations Independent Expert on Foreign Debt, Human Rights, and International Solidarity and is an Inaugurated Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy at the University of Nairobi. She is the only professor of fiscal law on the African continent and the first full law professor from a religious, ethnic, and racial minority in Kenya since independence. Professor Waris is also a commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Racism and Structural Discrimination in Health, a project that is housed at the Center. Her work with the Center will build on her current and coming UN reports and focus on research and thought leadership on international financial flows, human rights, and the global financial architecture in the context of climate, the high seas, and health among other topics.

She brings expertise in international and domestic law and decades of leadership connecting fiscal systems to human development, including her founding role at the House of Fiscal Wisdom, a Nairobi-based think tank focused on the international fiscal architecture. Her research and advocacy have been cited by global leaders including the president of Ireland and ministers from Honduras and the Bahamas, reflecting her global influence on equitable finance and governance.

“I am thrilled to join the team at Georgetown,” said Professor Waris. “Fiscal policy underpins everything—from how we fund health systems to how we address climate change. At the Center, I look forward to advancing conversations that put equity and accountability at the heart of global governance.”

In her collaboration with the Center, Professor Waris will advance research and policy on fiscal legitimacy, debt, and governance as they relate to health and climate, supporting the Center’s mission to strengthen accountability as a foundation of resilient health systems.

“As a scholar who has spent her career building the field of fiscal human rights, Professor Waris brings a unique perspective to how we fund and sustain global health,” said Sharonann Lynch, senior fellow at GHPP. “Her leadership will help us rethink how transparency and fairness drive healthier societies.”

She is also chair of the Supervisory Board of the CapaBuild Foundation in Amsterdam and managing editor of the Journal on Financing for Development.