Triss von Zahn
Policy Advisor
Triss is a Policy Advisor in BIT’s International Programmes team.
She is a development economist with 7 years experience conducting research in low- and middle income countries. Before joining BIT, Triss was a Research Lead at Triggerise where she was responsible for designing and managing Triggerise’s research activities across South Africa, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Her work focused on understanding the decisions that young people make regarding sex, sexual health, and contraception and how to use nudge interventions to motivate them to access sexual and reproductive health services via Triggerise’s Tiko platform.
Her previous roles have involved tracking online disinformation and investigating how misinformation spreads within networks of social media users, working on a large scale RCT to evaluate the impact of agrarian reform in the Philippines, and incorporating behavioural science principles and nudge interventions for a number of projects at different levels of South African government including: the City of Cape Town’s cholera response plan, the Western Cape Traffic Department’s “Safely Home” campaign, and a Western Cape Education Department project aimed at reducing violence and gangsterism among students.
She holds an MSc Economics for Development from the University of Oxford and an Honours degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from the University of Cape Town.
