Lou Compernolle is a Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice expert with 25 years of experience advancing reproductive autonomy for women and girls across the Francophone Sahel and beyond. She currently serves as Director of Strategy and Development at OASIS Sahel (Berkeley) and co-founded The Elles du Sahel, a transnational feminist advocacy network spanning the Sahel, Belgium, and the United States.

Her career spans technical and leadership roles at the World Health Organization, the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, PAI, and Enabel, the Belgian development cooperation agency. She has taught courses on Aid Financing at the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute and provided strategic and technical consulting to a wide range of governmental, non-governmental, and multilateral organizations.

Lou is a builder of networks that last, she has initiated, shaped, and led dozens of partnerships designed to defend the right of every woman and girl to make autonomous decisions about her own body, sexuality, and life. Her work sits at the intersection of civil society strengthening, feminist foreign policy, and ground-level programming in one of the world’s most politically complex regions.

She holds an MSc in Health Policy and Population from the London School of Economics.