Zakia is a Managing Partner and democracy advisor. Zakia is an expert advisor on deliberative democracy and a leading designer and facilitator of Citizens’ Assemblies and citizens’ councils that fulfil the OECD’s international principles.

Zakia is known for her ability to mobilise, creating direction and value for her clients and partners. She has been one of the driving forces in getting democracy back on the agenda in a Danish context and as an advisor on the international democracy scene in areas such as innovative democracy, capacity building, participatory strategies and policy development.

She describes herself as a democracy activist and entrepreneur who fights for more and better democracy, driven by participation in all the jobs and tasks she has. She can design, organise and facilitate all kinds of participatory processes – with a lifelong interest in learning, scalability of solutions, system change, mobilisation and interaction.

Zakia holds a Master of Science in Business Administration from Roskilde University Centre and Leiden University in the Netherlands. She has 25+ years of business and counselling experience from Huset Mandag Morgen, Socialforskningsinstituttet, Frederiksborg County/Momentum and is a former partner in, among others, Implement Consulting Group and a founding director of the consultancy company Spark.

Zakia also holds a number of positions of trust as a board member of Danmarks Radio, Wisti-fonden and Copenhagen Phil and serves as an Advisory Board member of Federation Innovation Democracy Europe and OECDS Open Governance board.

In 2020, Zakia founded Demokrati Garage (www.demokratigarage.dk)– a meeting place and workshop for democracy development, including the operating company and organisation of the same name. As well as the nationwide programme Demokrati Fitness (www.demokratifitness.dk) Zakia was also the founder and chairperson for a number of years of the Nordic-Baltic democracy platform Democracy Festivals Association (www.democracyfestivals.org), which has brought together The National Political Festival organisations and the Latvian democracy festival Conversation Festival Lampa.

Core competences

• Expert advisor in participatory democracy and innovative democracy
• Citizens’ Assemblies from a-z – organisation, facilitation, anchoring and implementation
• Design and management of complex and large-scale change processes
• Design and facilitation of everything from short, smaller-scale processes to 1000-person strategy processes
• Developing and implementing sustainable business models, especially in not-for-profit organisations