Miriam Altman
Executive Director: Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth
Human Sciences Research Council
Tel: +27 12 302 2402
www.hsrc.ac.za/cpeg.phtml
The Centre for Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Research Council develops innovative strategies to make employment central to policy-making and implementation. It draws together top decision- and opinion-makers in business, labour, government and academia to identify how the accelerated and shared growth initiative targets of halving unemployment and poverty might be reached. The centre’s executive director Miriam Altman is a leading expert in employment and industrial policy, with 20 years’ research and practical experience in economic development issues, and a record of 80 publications. Her work concentrates on framing public and private strategies to make the economy and industries more employment-oriented. Altman previously lectured at the department of economics and led the economics programme at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management, University of the Witwatersrand. She has a BA in economics from McGill University, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in economics from the University of Manchester.
Debbie Budlender
Specialist Researcher
Community Agency for Social Enquiry
Tel: +27 21 447 9852
www.case.org.za
Debbie Budlender has been part of the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (Case), an NGO operating in the area of social policy research, for two decades. She has been the overall coordinator of the South African Women’s Budget Initiative since it started in 1995. South Africa’s example in the area of gender-sensitive budgets has stimulated similar initiatives in a range of other countries. Budlender has served as consultant to NGOs, governments, parliamentarians and donors in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas. She has a BA honours in economics and an MA in sociology from the University of Cape Town and a BSc in computer science and mathematics from Unisa. She is a member of the UCT Council.
Jane Duncan
Executive Director
Freedom of Expression Institute
Tel: +27 11 403 8403
www.fxi.co.za
Dr Jane Duncan has worked at the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) since its establishment in 1994 and has been the director since 2001. Her key responsibility is the provision of overall strategic leadership and management for the FXI, which is dedicated to promoting freedom of expression, media diversity and opposing censorship. She was also coordinator of the FXI’s predecessor organisation, the Anti-Censorship Action Group. Before that, she worked at the Funda Centre in Soweto and then at the Afrika Cultural Centre in Newtown. She obtained a BA as well as honours and master’s degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand, and has recently completed a PhD through the Wits School of the Arts. She has published widely in the areas of media and freedom of expression.
Judith February
Manager: Political Information and Monitoring Service
Institute for Democracy in South Africa
Tel: +27 21 467 5600
www.idasa.org.za
Political analyst Judith February focuses on corruption and other dangers to democracy as manager of the Political Information and Monitoring Service: South Africa at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). She obtained her BA (law) and LLB degrees at the University of Cape Town, was admitted as an attorney in 1996 and practised law in Cape Town until 2000, when she obtained her LLM in commercial law, also from UCT. She has been working at Idasa since June 2000. Her focus includes corruption and its impact on governance, parliamentary oversight, constitutional law monitoring, institutional design and general political analysis. February is doing consultancy work on South Africa for a New York-based group as part of their Stability Index on 25 developing countries around the world. She is also a regular contributor to ePoliticssa — Idasa’s online political journal — and is a regular commentator in the media on politics in South Africa. She has been listed in the Financial Mail‘s Little Black Book of 300 black professionals from 2001 to 2005.
Ruth Hall
Senior Researcher
Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies
School of Government, University of the Western Cape
Tel: +27 21 959 3733
www.uwc.ac.za/plaas
Ruth Hall is a senior researcher at the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) in the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape. She is reading for her doctorate in the faculty of politics at the University of Oxford and working on a dissertation on the politics of land reform in post-apartheid South Africa, 1990 to 2004. She is a pundit on land redistribution policy and practice, and her research in this area is underpinned by gender rights and farm-dweller tenure. Hall has acted as an adviser to the department of land affairs. She has authored or co-authored 28 publications, mainly about the socio-political impact of land reform in South Africa.
Barbara Holtmann
Research and Development Contracts Manager: Safety and Security
Defence, Peace, Safety and Security Unit
CSIR
Tel: +27 12 841 2685
www.csir.co.za
Barbara Holtmann has made significant contributions in the crime prevention field, leading crime prevention research at the CSIR’s Crime Prevention Centre, which she joined in 2001. She serves on the advisory board of the Action for a Safe South Africa initiative and is the vice-president of the International Centre for Prevention of Crime, based in Canada. She was chief director for communication in the national Secretariat for Safety and Security, managing the public consultation process for the Firearms Control Act of 2000. In the late 1990s she was a project director at Business Against Crime: Gauteng and was instrumental in the design and implementation of two crucial programmes involving the public: the support partnership for police stations and the community-based victim support programme. She holds a master’s degree in public and development management from Wits and is writing her doctoral thesis, A Strategy for a Safe South Africa, at the Da Vinci Institute for Technology Management. Her focus is on the prevention of crime and violence and the reduction of criminality and opportunities for crime. She presents her work both locally and internationally.
Claudia Manning
Non-executive Director
Development Bank of Southern Africa
Tel: +27 11 884 0414
Dr Claudia Manning has worked in infrastructure development programmes in the public sector for several years, both in structuring and in financing infrastructure investments. She is co-founder and executive director of Sangena Investments, a black investment holdings company which owns a stake in a number of companies, including Tongaat Huletts. Manning serves on the board of directors of the Development Bank of Southern Africa and as a non-executive director on the boards of a construction company and a civil engineering company. She holds a DPhil in development studies from the University of Sussex.
Petronilla Ndebele
Communications and Partnerships Manager
Southern Africa Trust
Tel:+27 11 318 1012
www.southernafricatrust.org
Petronilla Ndebele has more than 15 years’ experience in communications, with seven years’ experience with the Southern African Development Community secretariat and eight years in the news and current affairs department at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation. In 1999 she received an award for excellence in business and economic reporting from the Federation of African Media Women Zimbabwe. She has served on the board of Worldview Botswana, an NGO focusing on development communication and also adjudicated for the Botswana Media Awards run by the Media Institute of Southern Africa. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration specialising in marketing communications from the Graduate School of Marketing, Institute of Marketing Management in South Africa, and an MA in international communications and development, from the City University in the United Kingdom. Ndebele is the communications and partnerships manager for Southern Africa Trust.
Dren Nupen
Chief Operating Officer
Kgontsi Holdings
Tel: +27 11 788 5673
Email: [email protected]
Whenever the modern ANC had to choose its leaders, Dren Nupen was there to print ballot papers, count votes and make sure that everyone accepts the outcome. Nupen was in charge of every internal party election of the ANC since its 1991 Durban conference. She has extensive experience in running elections, having been the director of the elections and balloting unit of the Independent Mediation Service of South Africa (IMSSA) from 1989 to 1996 and heading the Electoral Institute of Southern African (EISA) until 2002. She cut her teeth in politics through the trade union movement at the University of Cape Town and was involved in anti-apartheid activities, locally and abroad. She held leadership positions in George Soros’ Open Society Institute and Transparency International and is the chief operating officer in Kgontsi Holdings, an investment company seeking opportunities in South Africa and Africa in resources, property, information and communication technology and healthcare.
Elizabeth O’Leary
Executive Director
Women for Housing
Tel: +27 11 275 0268
www.womenforhousing.org.za
Born in the United States, Elizabeth O’Leary has lived and worked in South Africa on and off for the past 11 years, the past five of which have been spent as executive director of Women for Housing. The Section 21 company facilitates career and business development opportunities for women in the housing and construction sectors. O’Leary has been involved in housing and construction since she was young, owing to her parents’ construction, hardware and property development businesses. She has an MA from Boston University, where she did her thesis on The Challenge of Housing in the New South Africa: From International Assistance to Community Participation.
Sally Ann Peberdy
Associate Professor
University of the Western Cape
Tel: +27 21 959 2626
www.uwc.ac.za
Sally Ann Peberdy is an associate professor in the department of geography and environmental studies at the University of the Western Cape. She came to academia from the Southern African Migration Project (Samp), and has been a visiting research fellow and honorary lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. She read for her doctorate, on South Africa’s immigration policies, at Queens University in Canada. She has dedicated most of her professional career to studying immigration policy and the socio-economic impact of migration and immigration in Southern Africa. She coordinated the introduction of a training programme in international migration policy and management for government officials from Southern Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand and the development of a 10-part programme on migration for community radio.
Raenette Taljaard
Director
Helen Suzman Foundation
Tel: +27 11 646 0150
www.hsf.org.za
Raenette Taljaard was appointed director of the Johannesburg-based Helen Suzman Foundation in 2007. In 1999 she was the youngest woman elected to Parliament, where she served on the portfolio committee on finance and, during the arms deal investigation, the standing committee on public accounts. After leaving Parliament she took up a position as senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Graduate School of Public and Development Management. In her spare time, Taljaard conducts research on private military companies, publishing for the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces and the Institute for Security Studies. She holds a string of degrees — a BA in law, a BA honours in political science and an MA in political studies from Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg). She also has an MSc in public administration and public policy from the London School of Economics.
Beulah Thumbadoo
Director
Beulah Thumbadoo & Associates
Tel: +27 82 553 6733
www.angloplatshortstory.com
Beulah Thumbadoo divides her time between promoting social entrepreneurship and access to reading and writing. At national level, she runs an annual short story competition in the name of her sole proprietorship, Beulah Thumbadoo & Associates, with generous support from the Anglo Platinum Corporation. From this base Thumbadoo has launched the Million Books Campaign, which publishes the best stories. She has written Making Reading Matter for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), co-authored From Dust to Diamonds, a collection of stories about the work of successful social entrepreneurs in Gauteng for the Gordon School of Business Science, and published The Face of the Spirit, 100 essays by South African women. Thumbadoo has served on Ashoka’s Global Fellowship team and assists the Southern African desk in finding new fellows: proven public innovators. She is an able project manager, researcher and document editor and, she says, “takes on any such work that will move the planet and all who share it forward”.
Ilona Tip
Senior Adviser
Eisa
Tel: +27 11 482 5495
www.eisa.org.za
Mention the words “electoral education” in Africa and one of the names that springs to mind is that of Ilona Tip. Her title — senior adviser, democracy, conflict management and electoral education at the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (Eisa), of which she was one of the founders in 1996 — is almost as unwieldy as her job, which encompasses elements from the minutiae of office management to spreading the message of democracy through Africa. She is rarely to be found behind her desk, spending most of her life flying around the continent training, participating in workshops and putting into practice programmes she has helped develop in democracy, human rights education, voter education, electoral observation, electoral conflict management and political party agent training. Tip has a higher primary school teaching diploma from the Johannesburg College of Education and a BA in political science and industrial sociology from the Wits and Unisa. She has been a member of election observer missions in South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe (though not recently), Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Namibia, the DRC and Madagascar.
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