Anona Development Consultancy
Esua works as an independent energiser, motivator and strategist in the not-for profit sector. In 1995, she founded Anona Development Consultancy, offering strategic planning, management and governance development, facilitation, training, and team-building.
Her light-touch facilitation style combines humour with specially-designed dynamic, experiential, participatory, challenging techniques and frameworks, to create unique workshop experiences and processes that can help transform organisations. Esua is a lively, dynamic chair and keynote speaker at conferences and events.
Esua has worked with more than 100 different groups, networks and organisations on five different continents. She is a specialist in diversity, gender, race, and international development, drawing on personal experience over more than 30 years as a feminist activist in the women’s movement and women’s human rights worldwide, and in connecting communities in the UK and Africa in her role as Queen of Development of her family village in Ghana. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leicester in 2015 for her contribution to women’s rights, equality and the voluntary sector. In March 2018, Leicester University unveiled a specially-commissioned portrait of Esua as the first woman President Leicester University Students’ Union, to commemorate the centenary of women’s suffrage.
Esua is the author of prizewinning Mixed-Race memoir, The Space Between Black and White, published by Jacaranda Books, March 2020, #twentyin2020. "The book charts Esua's journey from the only Mixed-Race kid on the block in a White working-class neighbourhood in Battersea in the 1950s, and her search for identity embracing activism, Feminism, socialism, Black Power and her career in the voluntary and Human Rights sector. Crossing countries and continents over six decades, and tracing her roots to Ghana to discover an extraordinary family heritage, Esua's book explores the intersection of fundamental issues of Race, Class, Gender and inequality that society and organisations are grappling with today".
Esua’s has worked in over a hundred organisations across all not-for-profit sectors, including; Voluntary Sector UK, Europe and International Development, Women's Organisations, Training / Advisory and Community Organisations, Government, Public Bodies, Public Sector, Funding Bodies, Corporate sector and Black and Minority Ethnic Organisations. Esua's clients include: Action Aid, Age Concern Black & Minority Ethnic Forum, the British Council, Body Shop International, BOND, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Citizens Advice, Comic Relief, Commonwealth Secretariat, FORWARD, DfID, European Women’s Lobby, Equality and Human Rights Commission, Gender & Development Network, Greenpeace, International Diabetes Federation, NCVO, NSPCC, Save the Children, Trades Union Congress, Oxfam, Plan International, WaterAid, World Development Movement, Women's Aid, Womankind and Women & Children First UK.