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Two Tutu Fellows are on Avance Media's inaugural 100 Most influential African Women list. They are 2010 Tutu Fellow Jackie Chimhanzi, the CEO of the African Leadership Institute; and 2012 Fellow Julie Gichuru, an award-winning journalist and news anchor and executive in Kenya. The list is comprised of women from 35 African countries who are role models and whose accomplishments inspire the next generation of women.

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2016 Archbishop Desmond Tutu African Leadership Fellow André Ross has been made Executive Director, Head Global Corporate Banking, Sub-Saharan Africa for J.P. Morgan.  He has served J.P. Morgan as Executive Director, South Africa since June of 2017 and was Head of Financial Institutions Africa with Barclays Africa Corporate and Investment Bank.

André is passionate about empowering youth through sport. He co-Founded the Jala Peo foundation, which runs two academies - the Diepsloot Mountain Bike Academy and the Muldersdrift Academy.  The academies were started with the intention of helping children to use their time constructively and gives them a positive outlet for healthy activities.

The Governor of Kaduna State in Nigeria, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, has appointed 2011 Tutu Fellow Muhammad Sani Dattijo as his new Chief of Staff. Previously, he served as the Commissioner of Planning and Budget and was also the Director of Strategy for the Governor’s 2019 re-election campaign. In 2015, he joined the Kaduna State Excecutive Council as its youngest member. 

As budget czar, he was acknowledged as a champion of reform and was instrumental in moving Kaduna state to commence the implementation of  the Open Governance Partnership and presenting and delivering budgets ahead of time to the state legislature.

2013 Tutu Fellow Monica Musonda is joining the Ethics and Governance committee of the Confederation of African Football during a time of turmoil.  Monica was nominated to that position by the Football Association of Zambia delegation at the CAF congress and appointed by CAF to serve on the committee in July.  The Zambian lawyer and founder of Java Foods serves on a number of boards of prominent African companies, and chairs the board of Airtel Networks Zambia Plc. 

CAF is the administrative and controlling body for African football.  As such, it runs continental, national and club competitions and controls prize money, regulations and media rights to those competitions.

2009 Tutu Fellow Geci Karuri-Sebina PhD has been appointed to the Fourth Industrial Revolution - 4IR - Task Team by Naledi Pandor, the former South African Minister of Higher Education & Training. Geci had coordinated for South Africa an African Development Bank study on the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work in Africa. The appointment was one of Naledi's last acts as Minister before relinquishing the portfolio when President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed his new cabinet.  Geci forms part of an eight-member team with the task of providing advice on managing both the threats and the opportunities provided by the fourth industrial revolution.

4IR is a term that refers to the confluence of technologies that will impact how people live and work and includes artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, genetic engineering, quantum computing, and other technologies.

2019 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow Simbarashe Mhuriro has recently been appointed to the Board of Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe as a Non-Executive Director. The Standard Bank Group, of which Stanbic Bank Zimbabwe is a member, is the largest African banking group. It has a presence in 20 different countries.  Mhuriro is the founder and managing director of Oxygen Africa, which is a Zimbabwean investment company with interests in precious metals, renewable energy, and agriculture. Sincee 2013, Oxygen Africa has been committed to developing utility scale power plants, industrial rooftop, and commercial solar photovoltaic projects. 

Simbarashe was appointed to the board in May of this year.

2017 Tutu Fellow Mitoha Ondo'o Ayekaba, has published his first novel, titled Claro de Luna, at an event of the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists, in Madrid, Spain. The presentation ceremony took place on June 13 and counted amongst the audience personalities from the Spanish cultural and political world. Guillermina Mekuy, a local writer and businesswoman, read from the novel together with Emilio Porta, the Deputy Secretary of the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists.  During the reading, the two gave voice to the characters in the novel.

2016 Tutu Fellow Peter Biar Ajak had his day in court today in Juba, South Sudan, after being detained for almost a year.  He was arrested on 28 July 2018, allegedly for treason.  However, the treason charges were thrown out by a court in April.

In court today, he was sentenced to two years for allegedly disturbing the peace and violence for giving interviews to foreign media that were critical of the government.  His lawyer is contesting the sentence as freedom of speech is constitutionally protected in South Sudan. His term was backdated to the day he was detained, so he still faces a year in prison for his peace activism.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa extended an invitation to 2013 Fellow and human rights activist Catherine Constantinides to attend the SADC Saharawi Summit in South Africa in March 2019. Catherine has for years worked on behalf of the Saharawi, who live in territory occupied illegally by Morocco. 

The SADC Solidarity Conference with the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic started with a call for unity to ensure the right to freedom and self-determination of the people of the Western Sahara. It was attended by several heads of state, who took a stand for the Saharawi and expressed their support for decolonisation of the region and self-determination for Western Sahara on the basis of the values and principles that have guided the quest for independence throughout Africa.

2006 Fellow Palesa Kadi has been appointed to chair the ICASA hearings on sport broadcasting rights. Palesa is a media activist, researcher and has worked as a regulator in the broadcasting and telecommunications space, where she serves as an ICASA councillor. ICASA is South Africa's broadcast regulator. 

The hearings - and issue - is politically sensitive, as big-draw sport is currently mainly broadcast on expensive pay channels, locking out many ordinary South Africans from being able to watch sport on free-to-air TV.

Statement by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows on the unrest in Zimbabwe
17th January 2019

The Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows of the African Leadership Institute are a diverse group of civic, political and business leaders from 40 African countries, who are concerned with the governance and development of the African continent. We, the Tutu Fellows, are alarmed by the growing unrest in Zimbabwe and, most worryingly, by the Zimbabwean government’s reaction to it. The unrest by ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe is in response to a hike in the fuel price in Zimbabwe, which is now the most expensive in the region.

2008 Tutu Fellow Bibi Bakare-Yusuf has won the 2018 African Literary Person of the Year award from Brittle Paper. 

The Brittle Paper Award recognizes individuals who work behind the scenes to hold up the African literary establishment in the given year.  Bibi Bakare-Yusuf was recognised for her long service and leadership in publishing as well as her disruptive approach.  It celebrates a literary personality who has taken the lead in challenging and expanding assumptions about what it means to be an African creative. Brittle Paper says that it recognizes individuals for this award who explore Africa as a powerful idea that does not restrain creativity but inspires the most boundary-pushing and revolutionary work.

Earlier this year, AFLI carried a piece on how 2017 Tutu Fellow Yap Boum has been engaged in the battle against Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Yap is a microbiologist and epidemiologist with Epicentre Africa, an association created in the 80's by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) that set up a vaccine trial protocol with the Congolese government using an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck to be given selectively to those most likely to have had contact with a person carrying the disease.  Trial protocols are required for approval for use of experimental drugs. Since then, the battle against the outbreak has been in the news around the planet.

Yap told us as the year draws to a close that the battle continues and that it is serious.  He said that in less than six months, the DRC has seen two unrelated Ebola outbreaks.

A business school agricultural management program in Kenya started by two Tutu Fellows has reached another milestone. The agribusiness program was hatched by 2013 Fellow Nuradin Osman and 2015 Fellow Martin Mbaya at the 10-year celebration of AFLI in 2016.   The program seeks to be scalable and to teach young people to go into farming professionally, provide support for the African agricultural sector, and help farmers do more with less.  Students are now learning a range of hands-on skills and transitioning into work-placements. 

The pilot programme was launched towards the end of last year and more can be read about it here in AFLI News (see below). 

2009 Tutu Fellow Dr Julie Makani is on the 2018 list of the 100 Most Influential Africans compiled annually by New African Magazine.  She joins other Fellows in previous years who have been selected for this prestigious list. For years, she has been steadily working towards improving outcomes for people born with sickle-cell anaemia, a condition that disproportionately affects Africans, with more than 210 thousand children in Africa born each year with it.  

She is a Principal Investigator in Clinical Medicine at Oxford University and has researched the genomics of the disease to better understand the genetic and environmental factors affecting sickle-cell disease (SCD).