Lyla Latif

Dr. Lyla Latif is a Pan African lawyer, academic, and policy strategist whose work spans public finance, international taxation, legislative reform, and technology governance. She co-developed Africa’s first anti illicit financial flows policy tracker, a tool that enables countries to evaluate their laws, regulatory practice, institutional readiness, data exchange, and international cooperation in order to protect fiscal space. Appointed to Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, she helped steer national strategy on emerging technologies and public data governance. As a UNDP technical expert (2023-2025), she drafted income tax laws, national tax policies, and trained governments on international taxation and domestic revenue mobilisation. Earlier in her career she drafted Kenya’s land legislation that replaced colonial era statutes, a seminal contribution to her country’s legal architecture. Latif serves as in house expert counsel to Eswatini’s Revenue Appeals Tribunal on international tax disputes, and she has trained tax administrations, parliamentarians, ministries of finance, judges, civil society, trade unions, and journalists across four continents. Her work also advances the use of Islamic financial instruments to deepen domestic approaches to development. She has delivered lectures at Bhutan’s JSW Law School, Ko Guan Law School in China, University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, University of Lome in Togo, and the UK (Cardiff University, Warwick Law School, & London School of Economics), created a TED Ed video viewed by more than half a million people, spoken alongside a Nobel laureate on how illicit financial flows weaken states and push people into hardship, and collaborated with another Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa to redefine global fiscal justice, Recognised by the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria for her contribution to tax scholarship, Latif brings a decolonial, Pan African lens to global debates and translates comparative legal analysis into practical reforms that expand opportunity, strengthen institutions, and advance inclusive development. Her views have been captured by various Kenyan and international media.