Professor Kokila Lakhoo is a paediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital in Oxford and the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, with research interests in global surgery, fetal counselling, neonatal necrotising enterocolitis surgery and paediatric thoracic surgery. She is chair of the international forum for the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons and is personally developing paediatric surgery through a link in Tanzania. She is the director of Global Initiative for Children’s Surgery (GICS) that has followed on from the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery. She is editor of four books, including a recent joint venture with her African colleagues as editor to a text book namely ‘Paediatric Surgery: a comprehensive text for Africa’. She has to date contributed to 70 chapters to paediatric surgical text books and has over 300 peer reviewed publications.