Leadership, Governance and Expertise

Sanusi Ibraheem is the Head of the Strengthening Crisis and Pandemic Response Programme at the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) Office to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In this capacity, he provides programme management leadership and technical advisory services supporting AU’s continental health institutions, including the Africa Centres of Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).

Ibraheem is a skilled Programme Manager with over a decade of broad experience in democratic governance policy and practice advisory, institutional development, and capacity building on various themes, including civic engagement, innovations for development, and youth participation in policy processes.

Prior to his current role, his work focused on the intersection of governance, new technologies, and the meaningful participation of citizens in Africa’s development agenda.

Patricia Blankson Akakpo is the Team Leader of the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT). This feminist network promotes gender responsiveness in policies, programmes, and processes in Ghana and advocates for policy reforms that strengthen women’s human rights.

She is a feminist and a strong advocate of women’s rights and gender equality, sustainable development, and social change. Patricia serves on several national, regional, and global committees. She is a past feminist Co-Chair of the CSO Partnership for Development (CPDE) and is currently the Africa Regional Coordinator for the CPDE Feminist Group (CPDE Africa FG).

In a career spanning over 25 years, Patricia’s research and advocacy interests have been in the areas of gender and development policies and practices; development of gender mainstreaming policies and training manuals, leading and delivering training on economic justice, including gender-responsive budgeting and planning, gender mainstreaming, sustainable livelihoods, women’s land rights and social protection.

She has carried out several assignments on gender mainstreaming policies and trained senior-level management staff on gender policy, planning, and implementation processes. She has written several papers and published on gender and development issues. Patricia has led national, regional, and global processes on women’s rights and gender equality.

Valentina Montanaro is the People’s Vaccine Alliance Global Campaign Head. She is an Italian-born citizen of the world, currently based in Portugal, after living many years in the UK and Turkey. She studied Economics and holds two masters, one in Geopolitics from the Italian Society for International Organization in Rome and an MSc in Violence, Conflict, and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

She is an incurable optimist, a consummate campaigner, and an adaptive leader. She brings high-level strategy, campaigning, and communication skills developed through more than 15 years of working at the international and national levels with a broad range of political, public, private sector, and civil society stakeholders.

She worked with national teams in Burkina Faso, Belize, Cambodia, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, OPT, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, and Vietnam to develop strong campaign plans and facilitate learning processes.

She worked with some of the biggest INGOs – such as Oxfam, WWF, and ActionAid – in many alliances, campaigning around the world’s most pressing environmental and development challenges.

Briggs Bomba serves as the Programs Director for TrustAfrica, a pan-African foundation that works across Africa to promote democratic governance and equitable development. As part of the senior management team for TrustAfrica, Briggs provides strategic leadership to the programs team and oversees a diverse portfolio of programs and initiatives spanning several African countries that deal with a wide array of themes encompassing – Natural Resource Governance and Economic Transformation; Taxation, and Illicit Financial Flows; Climate Justice and Food Sovereignty; Citizenship, Rights and Civic Engagement; Gender and Women’s Rights; Youth, Education and the Future of Work; as well as African Philanthropy.

Previously, Briggs served as Project Director of TrustAfrica’s Initiative to Curb Illicit Financial Flows from Africa; Director for Zimbabwe Alliance – a donor collaborative founded by TrustAfrica, Wallace Global Fund, and Schooner Foundation to strengthen civil society in Zimbabwe; and Director of Campaigns for a Washington, D.C based Africa policy advocacy organization.

VALENTINA MONTANARO

Dr. Chiseche Mibenge is a human rights lawyer and educator. She has previously taught at the CUNY Graduate Center, Lehman College and Stanford University. She is the author of Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative (Penn Press). She is the co-editor of the book series, Human Rights Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan) and serves on various editorial boards, including, the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights and the Journal of Human Trafficking, Enslavement and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.

She serves on various boards, including, The Feminist Press, More Art, the Global Interfaith Network for People of all Sexes, Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and Expressions. She works at present, as the Director for Gender Initiatives at Episcopal Relief & Development.

Dr. Mibenge studied Law at the University of Zambia and earned her PhD in international human rights law from Utrecht University in 2010. She divides her time between New York City and Lusaka.

Memory Zonde-Kachambwa is a pan-African feminist, gender, and women’s rights activist. She grounds her work on feminist principles and an intersectional feminist analysis framework. She is the Executive Director of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET).

She is a dynamic leader in movement-building, feminist organizing, policy advocacy, and networking. She has over 18 years of experience developing, managing, and implementing programs promoting women’s and girls’ rights regionally and globally.

A seasoned cross-cultural thought leader and strategist bridging national, regional, and global women’s rights networks with policy leaders. She sits on several boards, working group s at the global, regional and national level- She is the current chair of She Decides Guiding Group, Equal Measures 2030 Council, SDG Kenya Co-Chair, one of the coleaders of the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalition on Economic Justice and Rights Female Students Support Network.

She has also provided technical expertise to networks such as the SOWAR Coalition, Global Family Law, Feminist Foreign Policy, Expert Review on Discriminatory laws against women in Africa and African Shared Research Agenda on Ending Violence against Women and Girls among others