Our Story

We built what we wished had existed.

Naserian Axis Consulting LLC was founded by Jamila Hoka Lugembe and Iman Ramadhan Hatibu, two East African women who have spent their careers inside the development systems they now help to transform. Between them, they bring over 30 years of practice navigating complex political environments, managing large-scale donor programs, and turning policy into practice that actually reaches communities on the ground. They founded Naserian Axis in the United States because the most effective African-led advisory shouldn’t have to choose between global credibility and contextual depth. It can hold both.

The development sector has spent decades calling for African ownership, feminist approaches, and locally-led solutions while systematically under-resourcing the African women practitioners best placed to deliver them. The result is a gap between what organizations commit to in their strategies and what they actually commission. Generic frameworks get applied to complex realities. Consultants who have never worked inside a community are brought in to design programs for it. And the people with the deepest contextual knowledge remain on the margins of the decision-making. We have worked inside that system long enough to know exactly where it breaks down.

Naserian Axis was founded to close that gap, not rhetorically, but structurally. We are not a firm that adds a gender lens at the end of a project or hires a local consultant to validate a framework built elsewhere. We are African women-led from the inside out: in our founding, our methods, our partnerships, and our accountability to the communities our work touches.Our expertise is grounded in African political, social, and institutional realities and shaped by experience across multilateral, bilateral, and civil society systems globally. That combination is rare. We built this firm because it needed to exist.

They founded Naserian Axis in the United States because the most effective African-led advisory shouldn't have to choose between global credibility and contextual depth. It can hold both.

Our Journey

Two practitioners. One shared conviction. Built from the inside out.

How We Got Here

2010–2015

Inside the Systems

Long before Naserian Axis existed, its foundations were being laid inside some of East Africa’s most consequential development institutions.Jamila Lugembe began her career at the Tanzania Women Lawyers Association (TAWLA), providing legal aid to vulnerable women and children, coordinating national advocacy coalitions, and helping establish community paralegal units across seven districts expanding women’s access to justice where formal systems had failed them. She went on to manage donor-funded programs, lead research and advocacy on women’s land rights and reproductive health, and coordinate civil society inputs into Tanzania’s constitutional review process.Iman Hatibu was building parallel foundations in law, organizational development, and civil society programming, working across youth engagement, climate, sexual and reproductive health rights, and the Sustainable Development Goals with the UN Association of Tanzania across ten regions.Both women were learning, from different vantage points, how policy gets made, where it breaks down, and what it costs communities when the gap between commitment and implementation is left unclosed.

2016–2024

The Collaboration

What makes Naserian Axis structurally different from most advisory firms began here not in a boardroom, but in the working relationship between a donor program manager and a civil society gender focal point in Tanzania.From 2016, Jamila was serving as Program Manager and later Team Lead for Governance, Human Rights and Gender at the Royal Danish Embassy (DANIDA) overseeing a USD 37M portfolio and serving as Gender Focal Point across health, private sector, and land governance programs. Iman was Communication and Gender Focal Point at Policy Forum, Dar es Salaam, managing a DANIDA supported governance and social accountability program and leading the organization’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion strategy.They worked together, not in parallel. Jamila’s portfolio included the Policy Forum program that Iman was implementing. Their collaboration spanned gender mainstreaming and integration, policy analysis, advocacy strategy, livelihoods programming, results reporting, and the complex, often frustrating work of translating donor commitments into civil society realities on the ground.They saw the same sector from opposite sides of the funding relationship. That dual vantage point: what donors intend, what implementers experience, and where the two diverge, became the analytical core of what Naserian Axis would eventually offer.

2024–2025

A New Country. A New Chapter. A Decision.

Life moved both women to the United States within the same period, Jamila to Annapolis, Maryland; Iman to Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a significant transition by any measure: new systems, new networks, new professional contexts to navigate. And for both, it coincided with the demands and profound adjustments of early motherhood; far from the support networks, communities, and familiar rhythms they had known in East Africa.It would have been entirely reasonable to pause. To settle in. To take time.Instead, they found themselves returning to the same conversation they had been having for years: about the gap between what the development sector promises and what it delivers. About African women practitioners who carry irreplaceable expertise but remain at the margins of the decisions that shape their own communities. About the kind of firm that didn’t yet exist but needed to.Iman pursued certification as a Human Rights Consultant through the US Institute of Human Rights and Diplomacy. Jamila joined the board of WILDAF Tanzania in an advisory capacity, maintaining her deep institutional ties to the African women’s rights ecosystem. Both continued working. Neither stepped back from the field.

2026

Naserian Axis Is Born

Naserian Axis Consulting LLC was formally established in the United States, co-founded by Jamila and Iman, headquartered across Minnesota and Maryland, and built on over 30 combined years of practice inside multilateral, bilateral, and civil society systems across East Africa and globally.