Filipa Oitaven is an anthropologist who is committed to using her participatory and cultural relativism toolkit to better understand how nature and people can thrive together. Filipa conducted the fieldwork for her Master’s in Social and Cultural Anthropology near the base of Mount Namuli in Mozambique in 2014 and 2015. As she pursued her research in the complex global drivers behind the ‘global land rush and its local impacts she crossed paths for the first time with the Legado team. She became a Program Manager for Legado in 2020 and a Senior Program Manager 2021.

Filipa has worked in a variety of community development and applied research roles. The common themes in her work have been indigenous lands rights and what development means for people who have different systems of values or identities. She spends a lot of her time listening and looking for ways to build bridges and to broker across these different systems, embracing different worldviews without devaluing any.