Charmian Gooch

Charmian Gooch is co-founder and director of Global Witness, a non-profit campaigning organisation that addresses the links between natural resource exploitation and the funding of conflict and corruption. She jointly led Global Witness's first campaign, exposing the trade in timber between the Khmer Rouge and Thai logging companies and their political and military backers. Subsequently, Charmian developed and launched Global Witness’s ground-breaking campaign to combat ‘blood diamonds;’ Global Witness was nominated for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize as a result of this work. In 2014 Charmian was awarded the TED Prize, given to an ‘extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change’. Also in 2014, Global Witness received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, awarded to ‘transformative leaders who are disrupting the status quo’.