Hayley Thomson-de Boor was the International Programme Specialist: Policy, Research and Advocacy for the IPN unit. She completed her Master’s in HIV/AIDS and Society from UCT in 2009. Her thesis was entitled ‘They say you are not a man’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Peer Pressure amongst Male Adolescents in KwaZulu-Natal – Implications for the HIV/AIDS Epidemic, and focused on masculinity, HIV and adolescent boys living outside Pietermaritzburg. She attended Rhodes University from 2001 – 2004, where she completed a BA in History and English and an Honours Degree in History. For her History Honours Research Paper she interviewed women who attended the Raphael Centre for People living with HIV/AIDS, and also attempted to understand why so few men attended the centre. She is originally from KZN, but moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg at the beginning of 2010. She relocated to Pietermaritzburg in 2013 and now works remotely.
Since arriving at Sonke at the end of 2010, Hayley has focused predominantly on policy analysis work for the MenEngage Africa network, managing the production of Sonke’s Africa Policy Report Series. Her other projects have included developing Sonke’s submissions into South Africa’s 2012-2016 National Strategic Plan on HIV, STIs and TB during 2011; a qualitative research project with absent fathers conducted in collaboration with the Centre for Social Development at the University of Johannesburg, published in 2013; and more recently she has been conducting training for partners on policy advocacy.
