Team
Who works on your assignment
cap-impact is a small practice. Marine Gauthier, its founder, leads every assignment. The complementary skills an assignment calls for come from a network of senior consultants, named to the client before signature.
Marine Gauthier
Founder and Principal Consultant
Marine has spent fifteen years working where the environment meets human rights, across international organizations, NGOs and research. She moves between the three on purpose: each one corrects the blind spots of the others.
Her work began in the forests of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. From 2011 to 2016 she worked with Indigenous and community organizations on free, prior and informed consent, land rights and REDD+ governance, and she stayed involved in the Itombwe landscape until 2020. In 2015 she accompanied Indigenous and civil society delegates from the DRC to COP21 in Paris. Those years taught her that a safeguard or a policy only matters if it holds up for the people it is meant to protect, and she has carried that test into every role since.
Until 2024 she was Senior Technical Advisor on climate safeguards at the United Nations Development Programme. She led a team of four across more than 150 Global Environment Facility and Green Climate Fund projects in over 50 countries, and was safeguards focal point for 22 GCF projects, from design to reporting. In 2023 and 2024 she supported African development banks through GCF accreditation of their environmental and social management systems. She has also carried out environmental, social and human rights due diligence for a national park in the Congo Basin. Along the way she has read more safeguard policies than most people would consider healthy, and she still enjoys it.
Advocacy has run through all of this work. She founded the practice in 2016 to help organizations turn what they know into influence. She works with NGOs and international organizations to build advocacy strategies and prepare negotiations. She has trained more than 300 professionals in advocacy, negotiation and de-escalation and still runs these trainings today.
Research gives her the distance that practice rarely allows. Her PhD at the Geneva Graduate Institute looks at how safeguards shape global governance. She sits on the scientific committee of the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and on IUCN's Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy. She has published in the Fourth World Journal and writes the Climate Justice Dispatch. She teaches at UCLy in Annecy, and has previously taught at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and EFAP.
She works in French and English from the shores of Lake Annecy, 45 minutes from Geneva: close enough for meetings, far enough to think.
Jeffrey Saba
Associate Consultant, Programs and Organizational Change
Jeffrey has spent fifteen years making projects work: setting them up, steering them and delivering them with the people who carry them. His career runs from strategy consulting to humanitarian programs, and he brings the methods of the first to the realities of the second.
He spent seven years in strategy and business transformation consulting for banks, insurers, energy companies and manufacturers, first as a consultant and then as a manager. He led process improvement and change programs, managed tenders and designed training at scale. On one assignment he rolled out 20 training courses for 600 employees. On another, he reorganized an assembly line and raised productivity by a third in three months. He holds Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and PRINCE2 certifications.
In 2022 he trained as a humanitarian program manager at Bioforce in Lyon and moved into the humanitarian and development sector. At Première Urgence Internationale he managed grants and donor relations with ECHO, BHA, the French Crisis and Support Centre and UN agencies. He worked first on the Asia-Europe desk in Paris, covering Ukraine and Myanmar with a grants portfolio of more than USD 25 million, and then in the field in Yangon. In 2025 and 2026 he was Country Manager for Futuresense Foundation in Thailand. There he led a team of eight and coordinated around 300 rotating volunteers across health, education and livelihoods programs.
His approach is the same in both worlds. He works alongside teams at every level, builds on what people already know, and sets targets with them rather than for them, so the results last after he leaves.
Before consulting, he co-ran a hotel on the Calais coast and rolled out a CRM system in Bangkok. Both taught him early that no process survives first contact with real users.
He works in French and English.
Our network
For assignments that call for skills or presence we do not hold in-house, we mobilize a network of senior consultants built over the years: evaluation and conflict analysis, safeguards, gender, partnerships and donor compliance, country expertise, qualitative research. The people mobilized are named in the proposal, never after.