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“In everything I do, I am working to create a world where young people and women in all their diversity are able to be healthy, happy, unafraid, and unapologetic.”
-Dr. Yvette Efevbera

Dr. Yvette Efevbera is the founder and CEO of SHE Thinks Group and a pan-African, strategist, and leader with more than 15 years shaping strategy, research, and funding globally. Her work bridges global insight and lived experience to spark change in health, gender equity, and development, with deep commitment to creating space for the leadership of young people and women.

Who We Are

Founded by a Pan-African strategist and leader with lived and professional experience across six countries, SHE Thinks Group blends strategy, leadership, and culturally rooted collaboration to reimagine how change happens. We work with bold partners and decision-makers – including funders, mission-driven organizations, research institutions, and purpose-led companies – who are reimagining how change happens and who leads it. Our work spans health, gender equity, and development, globally including in the U.S., and is always grounded in values that guide how we lead:

Cultural Intentionality
Lived experience meets strategy.
Local-Global Fluency
We move across systems and communities with ease.
Value-Driven Impact
Purpose, integrity, and process-awareness shape every engagement
Collaborative
Power-Shifting
We work for and with those closest to the work.
SHE Thinks Group was born from nearly two decades of navigating complex systems and seeing the same patterns repeat.

We witnessed well-intentioned efforts fall short, not because they lacked resources but because they overlooked what matters most: cultural context, community leadership, and the processes that make change last. We imagined something different: a future where strategy is rooted in culture, equity is non-negotiable, and those with lived experience are trusted, and resourced, to lead. SHE Thinks is more than a name. It’s a declaration: when SHE Thinks, and leads, she sparks change!

What Shaped Us

Cultural Ambivalence

Global decisions were made without local insight – especially across Africa and Asia – sidelining the people best positioned to lead.

Investing
in Diverse Players
We believe in the power of local actors and community-facing initiatives to drive sustainable, long-term change.
Impact
Over Process
Outcomes were prioritized over equity, eroding trust and missing the deeper work of collaboration.
The Power of Local Leadership
We’ve seen the transformative results when people with proximity are trusted and resourced. We invest accordingly.

About the Founder

Yvette Efevbera is the Founder and CEO of SHE Thinks Group, a strategy and advisory firm that partners with funders, changemakers, researchers, and companies to turn bold ideas into transformational impact in health, gender equality, development, and beyond. An executive leader with over 15 years of experience, she has shaped strategy, research, and funding in service of girls, women, and communities worldwide.

Yvette’s journey was deeply shaped by her mother and grandparents, who instilled lessons in community leadership, gender equality, education, and philanthropy from their upbringing in rural Nigeria – before she had language to understand what these values would mean. An early experience volunteering as Creative Arts Activity Coordinator at an AIDS orphan center in Namibia sparked the desire to drive systemic change. She went on to work in policy and then research, leading learning and evaluation for a nonprofit organization in Malawi, advise a range of global organizations, and lead research on adolescents and women’s health as an NIH-funded Principal Investigator at Harvard University. Most recently, Yvette served as an Advisor on Gender Equality at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she led work to end gender-based violence, child marriage, and advance adolescent well-being.

Yvette holds a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Beyond her professional roles, Yvette is a speaker, board member, and writer who finds joy in musical theatre, college football, and her titles as daughter, sister, wife, and mom. Rooted in Nigeria and shaped by pan-African and francophone experiences, Yvette has lived and worked in several countries and currently (mostly) resides in Washington, D.C.