One occasionally hears the hint of a Trini accent from the UK’s special envoy for gender equality, Alicia Herbert, OBE, as she talks about her journey from TT to becoming the director of the Education, Gender and Equality Directorate (EdGE) at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and what she hopes to accomplish working with the TT and UK governments.
She visited Trinidad on October 10 and Tobago on October 11 to meet with stakeholders in both islands, local partners of the UK Embassy, students of St Francois Girls’ College (which she attended), and also spoke at an International Day of the Girl conference in Tobago on October 11. She said she was excited when invited to visit, as she had not been back for almost ten years.
“Having been born and grew up here, coming back on an official visit is an interesting prospect. But at the same time, hopefully what I can do is lend my voice to issues that are important for both the TT government and the UK government, given that I grew up here and have an understanding of the place.
“It’s nice to be back here soaking up the vibrancy and the colour and the accents and that sort of thing. I love the way Trinbagonians relate to each other: there’s a sort of brutality in the honesty, but it’s always cloaked in a joke, so just hearing all of that, it’s quite nice.”
Herbert grew up in Carenage, and went to Sacred Hearts Girls' RC and St Francois Girls' in Belmont. She taught at Fatima College for two years before going to Canada at 20 to study economics and then development. She went to Cambridge University on a Commonwealth scholarship to do postgraduate work in international development, then did a master’s degree in social policy and planning at the London School of Economics.
Between obtaining her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Herbert worked in Zimbabwe as a teacher in the mid-80s. She said it was a fantastic experience in that she had to fend for herself in a time before easy connectivity through the internet, when it took a month for a letter to come from Zimbabwe to Trinidad, and a month to get back.
It was there that she met her husband, who was working for an engineering firm in Zimbabwe at the time. He is from Ghana, and they have two children who are now young adults living in the UK.
After graduating from the LSE, Herbert worked at the World Bank with a well-known anthropologist on issues of gender, Caroline Moser, for three years. She then worked on social policy in the UK and Europe, before joining the British government’s then Department for International Development, now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office since a merger in 2021, to work on poverty reduction, gender equality, HIV and AIDS.
“I was posted to three different countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria and Sudan. I came back to the UK in 2016 and started working specifically on girls’ education, but then within the last 1.5 years or so my remit was expanded, as I was promoted, and now I’m the direc
