Olivia Giles

Olivia Giles OBE (born 1965) is the founder and chief executive officer of the Scottish charity "500 Miles". She was a lawyer until in 2007, following a life-changing surgery, she founded a charity to fund prosthetic limbs for people in Malawi and Zambia. She helped to create the Lilongwe Institute of Orthopaedics and Neurosurgery in Malawi's capital city Lilongwe.

Life Giles was born in about 1968 and she trained as a lawyer at the University of Glasgow. After she graduated she became a workaholic property lawyer looking after the conveyancing of properties in Scotland. Her life changed when she noticed a rash on her feet after a medical check-up found her well. Within hours she was told that she had meningococcal septicaemia, and the only cure was to amputate her hands and feet. She was cared for by the Edinburgh surgeon Awf Quaba and he found that he was able to save her elbow and knee joints.

Giles reported that she felt good when she came round after the surgery, realising that she was lucky to be alive. She was soon fitted with prosthetic feet which enabled her to learn how to walk again. She began a recovery, but she realised that she would never be able to be a full-time lawyer as she had been before. She visited Malawi and saw the pitiful site of a man crawling down the street because he had a lost a leg. Giles realised that it was only prosthetic limbs that were preventing her from the indignity of also crawling around the streets of Edinburgh. that was based on shipping containers. By the end of the year the new facility was turning out 40 or 50 devices a month.

Giles was awarded an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010. By 2015 the unit in Lilongwe was manufacturing about 100 devices a month

Giles and her charity have been involved with the Lilongwe Institute of Orthopaedics and Neurosurgery (LION) since its inception. It began in a shipping container in the grounds of Kamazu Central Hospital in Lilongwe. LION provides free orthopaedic and neurological surgery. In 2025 it also had beds for private patients.

In 2025 she went to Lilongwe where her unit was transferred to the management of the Ministry of Health on 31 March with an assurance the 500 Miles charity would continue to assist with its running costs.

Other awards In 2004 she raised £450,000 and she was declared the Evening Times Scotswoman of the Year and the "Volunteer Fundraiser of the Year" according to the Institute of Fundraising Scotland. In the following year she became a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow.