Hakima Abbas is a political scientist, policy analyst and activist. She has been active in struggles for social justice on issues of self-determination, race, class, gender and sexuality for over fifteen years. Her professional work in civil society and the United Nations system as a trainer, strategist and researcher has focused on strengthening and supporting movements for change in Africa and the Middle East. Hakima is the editor and author of various publications and articles, including: Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser? and “People-led Transformation: African futures”. She currently serves as a board member and advisor to several global philanthropic and civil society initiatives. You can follower her on twitter at @HakimaAbbas.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is Nigerian/British and is the Executive Director of the African Women’s Development Fund, an Africa-wide grantmaking organisation supporting the women’s movement in Africa. She was previously the Director of Akina Mama wa Afrika (AMwA), an international development organisation for African women based in the UK, with an Africa regional office in Kampala, Uganda. She has an MA in History and an MA in Gender Studies, and experience as a journalist, writer, lecturer, trainer, and as an organisational development specialist. She has expertise in fundraising and organisational development, and training expertise in feminist leadership development and resource mobilisation. During her time at AMwA, she conceptualised the African Women’s Leadership Institute which has helped train over 3,000 women leaders in Africa. She has been Co-Chair International Network of Women’s Funds (2004-2006) Senior Fellow, Synergos Institute (2003-2005), and was President, Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) (2003-2005). She is currently a board member of the International Women’s Health Coalition, an Advisory Board member of Realising Rights – The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, and a board member of Resource Alliance (UK). She recently received the ‘Changing the face of Philanthropy’ award from the Women’s Funding Network, USA.

Jimmie Briggs has earned a reputation over the past two decades as a respected human rights advocate in the field of journalism, lecturer and educator. Through extensive travels to countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, the St. Louis, Missouri-native and graduate of Morehouse College has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and children soldiers, as well as survivors of sexual violence. A National Magazine Award finalist and recipient of honours from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists and the Carter Center for Mental Health Journalism, his book on child soldiers and war-affected children Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War won him accolades in 2005, and took readers into the personal journeys of war-affected youth. Further, Briggs has served as an adjunct professor of investigative journalism at the New School for Social Research, and was a George A. Miller Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois: Champaign-Urbana. His upcoming book Blood Work, narratively examines personal transformation and manhood through his own life and that of several recognizable figures from around the world. For his work with Man Up Campaign and the issue of violence against women, Briggs was selected as the winner of the 2010 GQ Magazine “Better Men Better World” Search, as well as one of Women’s eNews’ 21 Leaders for the 21st Century in 2011.

Abena Busia is professor and current Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers, where she teaches courses in African American and African diaspora literature, colonial discourse, and black feminism. She is co-director and co-editor of the groundbreaking Women Writing Africa Project, a multi-volume anthology published by the Feminist Press at CUNY. This collection is designed to recognize the cultural legacy in that assortment of voices by gathering together the original “cultural production” of African women. She is also associate editor of two of the volumes Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel (2005) and Women Writing Africa: Northern Africa (2009). In addition, Professor Busia is also the co-editor of Theorizing Black Feminisms (1993) as well as many articles and book chapters on topics including black women’s writing, black feminist criticism, and African literature. Her scholarship keeps her actively connected to her native Ghana, where a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Grant enabled Professor Busia and two Rutgers historians to lead an interdisciplinary program on “Teaching the History of the Slave Trade Routes of Ghana and Benin.” She has directed a summer internship taking undergraduates to work with Women’s Rights organizations in Ghana for the past seven years. She serves on a number of advisory boards and is the current board Chair of the AWDF-USA, a sister organization to the African Women’s Development Fund.

Tina Campt is Co-Director of BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Professor Campt’s research theorizes gendered, racial and diasporic formation in black communities in Germany, and Europe more broadly. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), an oral history of Black Germans in the Nazi period that examines the mutual constitution of racial and gendered formation from the Weimar Republic to the postwar period. She has edited special issues of Feminist Review, Callaloo and small axe, and together with Paul Gilroy, co-edited the volume, Der Black Atlantik (2004). Her second book monograph explores early twentieth century family photography of Black European communities: Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe examines the status of photographs in the process of historical interpretation. Engaging the burgeoning field of scholarship on affect, the book demonstrates how and why certain photographs ‘matter’, why they ‘register’ at multiple levels, as well as what those registers tell us about the cultural work of vernacular photography for diasporic communities.

Abigail Disney is a filmmaker and philanthropist. Her longtime passion for women’s issues and peacebuilding culminated in her first film, the acclaimed Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the Liberian women who peacefully ended their country’s 14-year civil war. The film premiered in 2008 at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the honor of Best Documentary. Abigail is currently executive producer of the groundbreaking PBS mini-series Women, War & Peace, the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the role of women in peace and conflict. Abigail co-founded the Daphne Foundation, which works with low-income communities in the five boroughs of New York City. She also founded Peace is Loud, which amplifies women’s voices for peacebuilding using the power of media. Abigail serves as a board member for a number of organizations, including the Global Fund for Women and the Peace Research Endowment. Her work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the prestigious International Advocate for Peace (IAP) Award from the Cardozo Law School’s Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Samuel G. Doe is the Senior Policy Adviser and Team Leader in the Policy and Planning Division of UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery. Aside from being in the UN for nearly a decade, Mr. Doe was a civil society leader in Africa for 15 years, having established and led the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding, the largest peacebuilding civil society network in Africa. He was also chair of the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response, a global network of conflict prevention scholars and practitioners, based in London. Mr. Doe is a Liberian national and holds a doctorate in Social and International Affairs from Bradford University, UK. He received an MA in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University, USA, where he teaches Conflict Sensitive Policy Development.

Simidele Dosekun has a research master’s degree in Gender Studies from the University of Cape Town, where she was a J.W. Jagger postgraduate scholar and researched the fear of rape amongst women who claimed to have never experienced it. Her bachelor’s degree is in Social Studies from Harvard University, where she was a Mellon Undergraduate Fellow. She comes from Lagos, Nigeria, and has spent the past three years managing an independent publishing house there, under whose imprint she authored a children’s educational book and co-authored two primary school textbooks.

Leymah Gbowee (2011 Nobel Peace Laureate) is a Liberian peace activist, trained social worker, and women’s rights advocate. She is founder and president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, founder of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, and co-founder and former executive director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa (WIPSEN-A). She is also a founding member and former Liberia coordinator of Women in Peacebuilding Network/West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WIPNET/WANEP). Gbowee’s leadership of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, which brought together Christian and Muslim women in a nonviolent movement that played a pivotal role in ending Liberia’s civil war in 2003, is chronicled in her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, and in the documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. In addition, Gbowee is the Newsweek Daily Beast’s Africa columnist. She serves on the boards of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, Gbowee Peace Foundation and the PeaceJam Foundation, and she is a member of the African Women Leaders Network for Reproductive Health and Family Planning. She is based in Monrovia, Liberia, and has six children. Currently, she serves as BCRW’s inaugural Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice.

Amina Mama is a widely published and travelled Nigerian/British feminist activist, researcher and scholar, and has lived and worked Nigeria, South Africa, Britain, the Netherlands and the USA. She spent 10 years (1999-2009) leading the establishment of the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute as a continental resource dedicated to developing transformative scholarship bringing feminist theory and activism together. In addition to serving as founding editor of the continental journal of gender studies, Feminist Africa, her publications include Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge, 1995); Women’s Studies and Studies of Women in Africa (CODESRIA, 1996); Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited, CODESRIA, 1997) and numerous book chapters and journal articles. Committed to strengthening activism and activist research in African contexts, her research interests include culture and subjectivity, politics and policy, women’s movements and militarism. She and Yaba Badoe co-produced the 50-minute documentary film The Witches of Gambaga (2010). She is a Professor and Director of Women and Gender Studies.

Kennedy Odede is an internationally recognized community organizer. Kennedy was born and lived for 23 years in the Kibera slum, the largest slum in Africa. As the oldest of eight children, he assumed responsibility for his family at the age of ten. The first time Kennedy ever had extra money—20 cents in 2004—he bought a soccer ball and started Shining Hope for Communities. As President & CEO of Shining Hope, Kennedy started The Kibera School for Girls, the slum’s first tuition free school for girls. Under Kennedy’s leadership Shining Hope has also opened a community health clinic, built eco-friendly toilets, and currently operates a community center from which they run extensive community programming such as health care and education outreach, gardens, gender violence support groups, microenterprise for HIV positive women, and literacy/computer training. Kennedy is a 2010 Echoing Green Fellow, won the 2010 Dell Social Innovation Competition, wrote an op-ed that appeared in The New York Times, and was recently honored by President Bill Clinton. He is a senior fellow with Humanity in Action and a senior at Wesleyan University.

Spectra is an award-winning Nigerian writer, gender justice advocate, and new media evangelist at Spectra Speaks, a global afrofeminist blog which publishes social commentary about gender, sexuality, diaspora communities, and movement-building through the lens of “Love” and media psychology. She is also the founder and executive editor at Queer Women of Color Media Wire (QWOC Media Wire, www.qwocmediawire.com), a media advocacy organization that amplifies the voices of LGBTI racial and ethnic minorities around the world, and the Community Engagement officer at Africans in the Diaspora (AiD, www.africansinthediaspora.org), a philanthropic organization that nurtures principled philanthropy in Africa. Her work using media to amplify the voices of marginalized people has earned her international recognition, appearing on both mainstream and alternative media outlets. In 2010, Spectra was honored by Fenway Health and the History Project for her work with women and the LGBT community. She was also accepted into EMERGE, a distinguished women’s training program for aspiring political leaders. In her spare time, Spectra curates live art and music events and hosts the monthly podcast, Kitchen Table Conversations (featuring interviews with global thought leaders about gender, politics, and pop culture).

Sylvia Tamale is a Ugandan feminist lawyer and academic based in Kampala, Uganda. She was elected as the first female Dean of Law at Makerere University in 2004. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law from Makerere University, a Masters from Harvard Law School and a PhD in Sociology and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Tamale founded and serves as coordinator of the Law, Gender & Sexuality Research Project, and was also instrumental in introducing the Policy on Sexual Harassment at Makerere University. She has lectured at several universities and published widely on a variety of topics, including her groundbreaking book, When Hens Begin to Crow: Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda (Westview Press, 1999). In combining academia with activism, she adopts a critical approach to the law that aims at enhancing students’ transformative personal growth and action. Dr. Tamale has won several awards for her work in defending the rights of marginalized groups such as women, sexual minorities and refugees.

Mohamed Yahya is the Framework Team Secretariat at the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, United Nations Development Programme.