The Principal and Owner of SPEER CONSULTING, LLC is Yasmin Dada-Jones, a Mandela Economics Scholar and an IIE Leadership Scholar.  Yasmin obtained her PhD in Health and Economic Policy from the University Of Maryland- Baltimore County and her MPH and MSc (Infectious Disease and Microbiology) from the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

She has served as the Executive Policy Director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.  In that role she was responsible for developing evidence-based policy for the Department, the Governor’s Policy Office and Executive Management in the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

In her prior position as Chief Director Social Sector, in the Policy Coordination and Advisory Service (PCAS) of the Presidency of South Africa she provided technical policy advice to the President and Deputy President of South Africa.  In this position she was instrumental in developing a blueprint for social policy action for South Africa for the next decade. (A Nation in the Making - A discussion document on macro-social trends in South Africa)

 http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/main.asp?include=docs/pcsa/social/index.html).

She was also the lead author in developing a monitoring and evaluation system in the Presidency of South Africa- (Government wide Monitoring and Evaluation Policy Framework) http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/main.asp?include=learning/reference.html).

She developed the “Towards and Ten Year Review” for the social sector- a backward mapping of the government social policy impacts (http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/main.asp?include=docs/index.htm and

assisted in the scenario planning process for the country

(http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/main.asp?include=docs/pcsa/general/index.html)

Aside from these special projects, she was also involved in strategic management of ten departments and was responsible for reviewing the policies, the budgets and strategic plans and for providing policy analysis.

She has 19 years of experience in Public Health planning, research and implementation and has conducted research on issues as diverse as economics to health promotion.  As a health economist she has studied the impact of poverty and inequality on health, cost savings analysis of public health programs, the costs of obesity, the cost of the uninsured children on the state economy and the impact of hospitals on the local economy. 

As a public health professional she has worked on women’s health and children’s health as well as concentrated on developing a sustainable Healthy Cities/Local Agenda 21 Program for Johannesburg, South Africa.

She has extensive experience in assessing the impact of processes on health care decision-making and outcomes.  For example she was intimately involved in assessing state health policy for reducing disparities in health care, improving cultural competency of the health care workforce, as well as improving workforce career lattices in Pennsylvania.