Our People

Dave & Kerry Rickards
Trustees & Founders

Anubha Rawat
Projects Director

Marnie Rickards
Operations Director

Dr Bidya Pant
Consultant and Special Advisor, Eye Programs

Dagmar de Oliva
Finance Manager

Joanne Taig
Logistics Manager

Dave & Kerry Rickards
Trustees & Founders
Dave and Kerry left university to start a small market business selling handmade costume jewellery. Over the next 30 years, through numerous reinventions, that business transformed into a large discount variety import, wholesale, and retail company with over 100 stores and 3,000 employees.
In 2000, they sold Clint’s Crazy Bargains to a listed company and then spent the next decade traveling to developing countries, exploring why so much aid was ineffective. A chance encounter in 2009 with Chuck Feeney (the Billionaire Who Wasn’t) inspired them to dedicate their wealth and time to health interventions with real, immediate, and tangible impact.

Dr Bidya Pant
Consultant and Special Advisor, Eye Programs
Dr. Bidya Pant is a renowned Nepalese Ophthalmologist and social entrepreneur who has been consulting for the DAK Foundation, now DAK International Network (DIN), since 2013. With over 30 years of experience, Dr. Pant has personally performed more than 200,000 cataract surgeries, including an impressive 16,005 surgeries in 2007 alone.
From 2004 to 2015, Dr. Pant managed Geta Eye Hospital in West Nepal. Starting as the sole Ophthalmologist, he transformed the facility into a teaching hospital with 12 eye doctors, performing up to 42,000 surgeries annually. Since 2013, in collaboration with monastery eye hospitals in Myanmar and the DAK Foundation, he has overseen more than 250,000 free cataract surgeries, personally completing over 50,000 of these as of July 2024.
Beyond his surgical work, Dr. Pant has been instrumental in establishing two new eye hospitals in Nepal and has served as Consultant and Advisor for DAK initiatives in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and now Pakistan. A strong advocate for High Volume Small Incision Cataract Surgery, Dr. Pant champions this efficient approach, which streamlines procedures and maximizes patient access, significantly reducing costs and transforming countless lives.

Marnie Rickards
Operations Director
Marnie oversees DIN’s medical equipment programs, collaborating with health networks across Asia and Africa to enhance service efficiency and quality through the provision of essential medical equipment and biomedical program support. With 15 years of experience in the not-for-profit sector, Marnie brings a diverse background that includes roles in business administration, finance, and having worked across commercial, retail, and media industries.
Marnie has been part of the team since 2010.
From 2023 to 2024, she contributed to the WHO Technical Working Group for the National Oxygen Scale-Up Framework Meeting: Road to Oxygen Access. This group was tasked with creating a comprehensive template to guide countries in developing evidence-based, inclusive, and costed national plans for medical oxygen scale-up.
Marnie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Macquarie University and serves on the Board of Partners for Equity (Australia) as well as the Board of Advisors for the Gould Family Foundation (USA).

Anubha Rawat
Projects Director
Anubha Rawat brings over two decades of expertise in the international development sector. At DIN, Anubha oversees a diverse portfolio of programs and is deeply committed to fostering initiatives that are community-driven and locally sustained.
Anubha has been part of the team since 2015.
Beyond her role at DIN, Anubha lends her expertise as a member of the Board of Advisors for the Gould Family Foundation in the USA and serves on the Board of Partners for Equity in Australia. She is also an Advisory Member for the Australian International Development Network (AIDN), and hosts the podcast Philanthropod, which advocates for more and better giving to international development.
Anubha holds a Master’s degree in Child Development from Delhi University and a Graduate Diploma in International Studies from the University of Sydney. She is also a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Dagmar de Oliva
Finance Manager
Dagmar brings over two decades of experience across the corporate, government, and not-for-profit sectors, specializing in compliance, bookkeeping, forecasting, budgeting, and project management. She leverages her extensive expertise and exceptional organizational skills to support the work of DIN.
Dagmar has been part of the team since 2018.

Joanne Taig
Logistics Manager
Joanne brings over 20 years of specialized expertise in logistics, procurement, inventory management, and systems control, developed through her work with leading multinational companies in IT and industrial automation. At DIN, she applies these critical skills to support a core focus of our mission: sourcing and distributing essential medical equipment to organizations and facilities in need across the developing world.
Joanne has been part of the team since 2015.
Our Areas of Work
There are 4 main pillars of our work

Restorative Eye Surgery
To date 555,000 cataract surgeries funded.
There are several hundred million avoidably blind persons around the world.

Essential Medical Equipment
Range donated to over 40 countries.
Providing health networks with essential equipment that can increase efficiency and enable health care workers to deliver better care.

Women's Health
20,000 prolapse and fistula surgeries funded.
Focusing on Birth Injury Repair and Family Planning, we provide training to doctors in both surgical and conservative prolapse management.

Family Planning
Over 500,000 CYPs provided.
Enabling women to make informed decisions about whether and when to have children reduces unintended pregnancies as well as maternal and newborn deaths.