Smruti Patel is a humanitarian and development professional with expertise in facilitating conversations on safeguarding, accountability, localisation and collaborative partnerships. She is passionate about accountability to affected populations and promoting local leadership and is interested in using new more strategic and holistic approaches to ensure more of local voices are heard and influence policy decisions. She is a qualified coach using Human Potential methodology to accompany local leaders, teams and organisations to reflect on deeper attitudes and behaviours to lead to being at full potential. In 2014, she founded the Global Mentoring Initiative (GMI) based in Geneva. It works in collaboration with partners to promote holistic and equitable partnership approaches. She is one of the founder member of the International Convenor Committee of Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP). She joined the IARAN fellowship because she would like to work with others to lead courageous conversations to bring change in the aid architecture to ensure equitable partnerships and sector fit for the future.