2019 cohort
Benedicta Ayarite
Nigeria
Benedicta is Assistant Manager, Compliance at Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund. She is a youth development specialist.
Britta Hackenberg
Namibia
Britta is Director of Projects at the Namibia Nature Foundation, with a background in land rights, land reform, and forestry management.
Edward Mubiru
Uganda
With a background in business administration and quality assurance in international development, Edward is Operations Manager for the Land Commission Inquiry, 2017, Uganda.
Faith Njore
Kenya
Faith is a Director at Lion’s Head Global Partners, where through the Off-Grid Energy Fund, she invests in renewable energy enterprises that electrify off-grid communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her background is in Actuarial Science with certifications from the IFOA, UK, and in Social Impact Analysis - among others.
Frank Annor
Ghana
Frank is CEO and Field Director for the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory, working to install weather stations, GIS and remote sensing work, modelling, simulations, and early warning.
Cheelo Chooma
Zambia
Cheelo is Managing Director of Nature's Cure, an organisation that provides nutritional education services. Cheelo has a background in nutrition and dietetics, and his passion is for social and environmental equity.
Guillaume Nyagatare
Rwanda
As a professor of agriculture, Guillaume is passionate about the food security of his nation. He is Senior Lecturer Agricultural Engineering, Irrigation, and Drainage and a researcher in soil and sustainable agriculture.
Mohammed Ali
Kenya
Mohammed works in international community development in the areas of public health, epidemiology, food sciences, and environmental services.
Lorenzo Davids
South Africa
Lorenzo is CEO of Community Chest, Western Cape, which acts as an innovation hub for donor engagement and investment in community development projects, seeking to create transformational relationships between donors and partner organizations.
Kathy Mbondo
Kenya
Kathy is an entrepreneur and sales and marketing director, who is passionate about bees, acacia trees, and nurturing her country's ailing environment. Her company, Asali Natural, works with beekeepers, health companies, and retail outlets to create a sustainable producer-consumer chain.
Prosper Rogers Ayaa
Uganda
Prosper holds degrees in law and legal practice, and currently works as a researcher for the Centre for Community Development and Peaceful Co-Existence, working on issues of justice administration, gender-based violence, children's rights, and alternative justice systems.
Naa Sodzi-Tettey
Ghana
Naa is a medical doctor with experience as a clinician, district medical practitioner, and physiology instructor. Her research is in the areas of human longevity and ageing.
Maylat Mesfin
Ethiopia
With a professional background in human rights and social justice, Maylat focuses on sustainable community mobilisation and inclusive advancement of vulnerable populations.
Rojo Rapanoelina
Madagascar
Rojo's background is in population and development and law. She is currently Manager of Food Security Information Systems, FAO Madagascar, working on early warning, food security, and vulnerability surveillance.
Sarah Asafo-Agyei
Ghana
Sarah is Founder and Managing Director of Attai Capital, Limited, providing wealth and investment advisory services.
Sylvia Ng'eno
Kenya
Sylvia is Head of Programmes at Producer's Direct, a farmer-led enterprise which connects farmer's worldwide.
Hellen Mary Wanjoya
Kenya
Hellen-Mary is Project Manager, Research and Development, Gifted Hands Group, managing community learning events, especially with rural women and youth in social entrepreneurship and social development.
Vicky Udomi
Nigeria
Vicky is CEO of Kings and Queens Integrated Enterprises, Ltd., supporting small and medium food producers, in particular, cassava farmers.
Zintle Razıya
South Africa
With a background in inclusive innovation, development studies, political studies, and media, Zintle is passionate about youth empowerment and entrepreneurship. She is Responsible Business and Sustainability Lead at YES (Youth Employment Services).
Per Olsson
Programme director
Per leads the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s stream on Resilience Science for Transformation. His research is in agency, social-ecological innovations, transformations to sustainability, and how to reverse current trends of crossing critical thresholds and tipping points in the earth system. Per previously co-lead the Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Program on Social Innovation and currently is serving as the director for the BALTIC-LEAD program. Per has invested heavily in facilitating interactions among scientists, policy makers, artists, businesses, and the public, through a variety of initiatives. For example, he is co-founder of Coral Guardians, which serves as an innovation space for combining music, policy, and science. He was also the co-founder of SHIFT, an accelerator for start-ups and social-ecological entrepreneurship. He served as the scientific advisor to MacGillivray Freeman Films, Incorporated IMAX film, Coral Reef Adventure, and was also the national coordinator for the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Program in Sweden.
Lauren Hermanus
Content expert and facilitator
Lauren is the founder of Adapt, a network-based sustainable development practice. She is most thrilled by the integration of knowledge and imagination in service of speculative futures that interrupt unsustainable and unjust societal configurations. She has worked on sustainable development in the public and private sectors, which she continues to do, with strong links to academic research centres. Her development practice and research is strongly grounded in her mentorship under the late Paul Cilliers, with whom she completed an MA in complexity and philosophy (Stellenbosch University). She has also more practice-centred training through her MPhil in development policy and practice (University of Cape Town). From 2016-2018, Lauren was the South African lead, through the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI), on the international GREEN-WIN project. This was an interdisciplinary collaboration focused on bottom-up actions for a low-carbon transition, with UCT leading on energy poverty, and on rural and urban climate resilience. Lauren focusses on decentralised and distributed development challenges. She is currently reading for her PhD, focusing on decentralization in sustainable energy transitions. She also has an interest in public leadership and governance, interrogating issues of corruption and state capture in developing country contexts.
Scott Drimie
Content expert and facilitator
Scott is a Senior Researcher and facilitator working on food systems in southern Africa. Taking a largely political economy lens, he has focused primarily on food policy and the facilitation of new institutional arrangements for food system governance. Scott’s academic career pivots on his role as Associate Professor (Extraordinary) in the Department of Global Health and at Complex Systems in Transition (CST) through the School of Public Leadership. He co-designs and facilitates learning processes across many of the thematic areas at the CST. Scott has directed the Southern African Food Lab since October 2013. This is a multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together actors in the regional food system to identify and pilot innovative means to achieve long-term, sustainable food security. This is done through the use of collaborative learning and facilitation approaches. The Food Lab is housed at the Faculty of Agri-Sciences at Stellenbosch.
Michele-Lee Moore
Content expert and facilitator
Michele-Lee has a background in global governance, water, social innovation, and international policy. She is currently the Director of the Sida-funded Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for development programme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Stockholm University, and co-lead of SRC’s Transformations research stream. Her research focuses on social innovation, transformations for social-ecological resilience, and water governance; and she invests considerable time in mobilizing knowledge for real-time development projects with practitioners. From 2013-2017, Michele-Lee was the co-lead of the Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Program on Social Innovation. She also leads the Water, Innovation, and Global Governance Lab based at the Centre for Global Studies, University of Victoria, Canada.
Loretta Rose
Curriculum design and group facilitator
Loretta has a background in international development and intercultural education and has worked around the globe providing support to change-makers through process facilitation, capacity building, curriculum development, writing, and project management. She has worked with the University of Waterloo in various support roles on the Rockefeller Foundation Global Fellowship Program on Social Innovation, the WISIR online learning modules, the Banff Centre Getting to Maybe residency, the J.W. McConnell Foundation/WISIR’s LabWise social innovation lab process, and is currently lead consultant working with a team at the University of Cape Town’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship to build a systems innovation community of praxis, called systems play. She holds degrees in Anthropology and Modern Languages, Intercultural Education, and Political Science (International Relations).
Ncedisa Nkonyeni
Developmental evaluator
Ncedisa is the Social Systems Innovation Project Manager at the University of Cape Town, Graduate School of Business’s Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She leads the Africa regional hub of the global systems play team - a support and resource node for systems innovators pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals. She is also co-convener of the Social Entrepreneurship and Systems Change Executive Education course delivered by the Bertha Centre. She is deeply curious about what happens at the intersection of social justice and systems thinking, with a particular interest in the potential for counter-narratives to shift the values and beliefs that uphold unjust systems.
Currently reading for a Masters in Philosophy (Inclusive Innovation) at the Graduate School of Business, her research question is around the institutional work that is necessary and possible to bring about inclusive education. Her academic background is in Clinical and Research Psychology (University of Cape Town and the university currently known as Rhodes, respectively). Her work and research experiences span a variety of sectors including film policy analysis, popular culture and oral history, gender, and identity.
Cecilia Emilsson
Project coordinator
Cecilia has experience in the development cooperation sector in Latin America and in the Embassy of Chile in Stockholm, where she worked with international trade and promotion. She is passionate about development with a focus on gender and intersectionality. She has a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and a Master's degree in Gender Studies and Political Science from Lund University. In addition to supporting Transforming Change, she works with BALTICLEAD, formerly LEAP, in the Baltic+ region.