Advisory Council

The Advisory Council exists to pressure-test ILSI's direction from the outside. Its members are drawn from labour law, academic migration research, consular practice and development finance, and they hold no executive authority over ILSI's operations or budget — their role is to advise the Board and executive leadership, not to run the institution.

Advisory Council members serve fixed terms and disclose any professional relationship with a government, employer or agency active in ILSI's pilot corridors. Their advice informs ILSI's policy briefs and corridor-level masterplans.

What the Council does, and does not, do

The Advisory Council reviews proposed corridor strategies, comments on draft policy positions before they are published, and can raise concerns directly with the Board of Directors if it believes ILSI's direction is not well supported by evidence. It does not approve budgets, hire or manage staff, or direct casework — those responsibilities sit with the Board and executive leadership respectively. This separation is what allows Council members to give candid, sometimes uncomfortable, advice without being implicated in the decisions that follow it.

Current Advisory Council members are listed below.

Where Council expertise comes from

Members are drawn deliberately from outside ILSI's own operational network — practising labour lawyers, academic researchers who study migration corridors, former consular officials, and development-finance specialists — so that the Council's advice is not simply a reflection of ILSI's own institutional thinking. This diversity of background is what allows the Council to challenge assumptions that staff closer to day-to-day operations might not see.

How advice reaches decisions

Council input is recorded and shared with the Board of Directors alongside management recommendations, so that Board members can see where the Council agreed, disagreed, or raised a concern the executive team had not addressed. This process is designed to make disagreement visible rather than smoothed over before it reaches the people accountable for the final decision, since a Council whose dissent is quietly filtered out before reaching the Board would add little real value beyond appearance. Members of the public and prospective partners can rely on the Council's presence as a genuine, not cosmetic, check on ILSI's own thinking, and can raise a question about any published position directly with the Council through ILSI's contact page.