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2006 Tutu Fellow Kunyalala Maphisa has been appointed as an Independent Non-executive Director to the Board of PPC Cement and a Member of its Investment Committee and the Social, Ethics and Transformation Committee. The appointments were made as of the beginning of February 2021.

Kunyalala is co-founder and Principal Partner for Brighton Wealth Subsaharan, a South African based investment and advisory firm with a diversified investment portfolio. She is also the President of BWASA, the Business Women's Association of South Africa, the largest association of professionals and businesswomen in South Africa.

Dr Angela Gichaga - a 2019 Tutu Fellow - joined the PSI Board in January 2021. Population Services International (PSI) is a non-profit global health organization with programs targeting malaria, child survival, HIV, and reproductive health. It is based in Washington, DC; Nairobi; and Amsterdam and has been in existence for more than half a decade.

PSI says that while it is a nonprofit, it uses measurable business practices to build strong health systems in the private and public sector to save lives. It has more than 8,000 local experts in more than 50 countries with which it works. 

2014 Tutu Fellow Mokena Makeka was appointed Principal at Dalberg, and Director of the South Africa Office commencing January 2021. In his role, he will have a particular focus on the following areas: cities and urban development; the built environment and natural infrastructure; digital communities, innovation and entrepreneurship; transport and renewables; green livelihoods; forest economy; beyond smart cities and spatial and social transformation through design.

Dalberg Global Development Advisors is a strategy and policy advisory firm. Founded in 2001, it specialises in global development.

African Business Magazine has published a thought piece by AFLI CEO Jackie Chimhanzi in which she argues why Africa needs greater representation by young leaders at the decision-making table. The magazine published it as part of a special report to the 2020 World Economic Forum summit in Davos.

In the piece, which was co-written by the Pakati Project Manager Monique Atouguia, they point out that it is important for young people to occupy key leadership positions, but not just any young people. It is the young people who have the energy, focus, intensity, risk appetite, passion and single-minded drive to deliver well-articulated burning visions. Young leaders need to be at the centre of power, where decisions are being made.

2008 Tutu Fellow Elsie Kanza has been selected for a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship, a program of the Robert Bosch Academy. With this Fellowship, the Robert Bosch Academy offers outstanding personalities from over the world a residency of several months in Berlin.

The residency provides Fellows with the intellectual and physical space to pursue individual research and outreach activities on future-oriented topics in an international context. The Fellowship enables them to engage and study beyond their normal professional commitments. The highly-individualized stays offer these Fellows the intellectual freedom to deal with a variety of topics and issues beyond their regular duties and obligations. 

2008 Tutu Fellow Nitesh Dullabh has been appointed to serve as a director on the governing board of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP). The ISSP is the world's leading professional association of sustainability practitioners.

Nitesh is a global environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainabilty development goal (SDG) expert, and has over 20 years experience in facilitating Fortune 200 companies with their global expansion projects in developed and emerging markets.

2010 Tutu Fellow Lerato Mataboge delivered a TEDx Lyttleton Women Talk on the necessity and urgency for African countries to trade among themselves as a way to address economic challenges and recover from the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Titled, Why Intra-Africa Trade Matters, she says that African countries not only need to trade among themselves as a way to address economic challenges and undo colonial patterns of consumption and distribution, they need to begin doing so with a sense of urgency.  This type of trade can play a key role in helping the continent recover from the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She begins her talk about vanilla, the bulk of which in the global market is grown in Madagascar.  Madagascar exports it and when it comes back to the continent, it costs so much more. Africa trading away its resources must change, she says, and the continent must begin adding value before exports occur so as to retain the value at home.

2010 Tutu Fellow Robtel Neajai Pailey PhD has launched her monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia. Robtel is an Assistant Professor in International Social and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Robtel's book asks whether dual citizenship reproduces inequalities, using Liberia, Africa’s first black republic, as an extended case study. It is based on over 200 in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe and North America. The inaugural launch of the book was held in Monrovia at the University of Liberia on official publication day on 7 January.

CNN’s Inside Africa have profiled 2017 Tutu Fellow, Bosun Tijani, along with two other of Nigeria's tech entrepreneurs and innovators who are using technology to provide life-changing solutions to everyday problems.  Bosun is the founder and CEO of CcHUB. 

CNN says Nigeria has 90 tech hubs, the most on the continent. It said that in 2019, one report had found that start-ups in Nigeria had raised nearly $400 million, more than double the amount from the previous year. CNN went on to say that in recent years, Nigeria had become an incubator for some of the continent’s biggest start-ups.

SA 2020 SCENARIOS SUMMARY

In 2004, a group of young South Africans, selected for their acknowledged leadership potential, envisioned that by 2020, South Africa would be “An inclusive, prosperous and just society founded on ubuntu, equality and freedom, fostering creativity and allowing its people to realise their full potential.” This Vision formed the foundation of their preferred scenario – “All aboard the Dual Carriageway”. It was one of four scenarios, ranging from disastrous to optimal.

Their hope was that “a quarter of a century after its transition to democracy, it would be a South Africa that has significantly dealt with the legacy of underdevelopment, poverty, unemployment and inequality that it had inherited. They imagined a South Africa that will have proudly taken its place within the world community of nations, as an economic and political equal.”  The group was facilitated by - and the final paper drafted by - Olubenga Adesida PhD, and myself.

The seventh edition of Choiseul 100 Africa – the Economic Leaders for Tomorrow 2020 has been released, honoring the most talented leaders of their generation who have had a positive impact on the continent's economic development, on society, and Africa’s success. Over the years, a number of Tutu Fellows have made previous lists. In this latest edition, eight were selected for the 2020 100 listing and a further eight for the 2020 200 listing.

The list is compiled independently by the Choiseul Institute every year, identifying and ranking African leaders under the age of 40 who are playing an important role in Africa’s future.

A 2006 Tutu Fellow, Wendy Burgers, is leading research into reinfection of patients by COVID-19.  She had noticed that globally, a handful of patients had reportedly been reinfected with COVID. She thought it was important to discover and understand how the immune system responds to the virus and whether it provides previously infected patients with a level of protection, should they be re-exposed to the virus.

Wendy is a viral immunologist and Associate Professor in the Division of Medical Virology in the Department of Pathology in University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Faculty of Health Sciences. Wendy and her team partnered with a healthcare worker study in UCT’s Department of Medicine, which involves regular sampling of a group of healthcare workers who have a high risk of exposure to the virus but who had already been infected with COVID-19. It also used a group of their peers who had not.

Like many of you, I watched yesterday as rioters and terrorists desecrated the United States Capitol Building. I was not shocked. That such violent opposition to U.S. democratic institutions would manifest after years of sustained assault should not be shocking.

The images from January 6th should not be considered an anomaly. We should resist the urge to label such acts as un-American and we should not move too quickly towards an overused rhetoric of healing. If this country is to survive the next few years, let alone thrive, we will have to face the aspects of our American identity that make so many people feel it is acceptable to deny reality—the reality of election results, the reality of a pandemic, and the reality of deeply rooted racism that manifests in the care with which law enforcement treated (mostly) White men rampaging through the halls of the Capitol Building.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science magazine has profiled 2019 Tutu Fellow, Prof Edwine Barasa, and his role in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya. He is the director of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, a long-standing collaboration between Kenya and the United Kingdom, in Nairobi, Kenya, as well as being a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Oxford.

Over the course of the pandemic, Edwine has worked with epidemiologists and advised Kenya’s Ministry of Health on how to allocate its limited resources. The KEMRI-Wellcome Trust has been helping the Kenyan government with testing and viral sequencing, and hosted a Kenyan trial of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca.

2019 Tutu Fellow Samson Itodo was appointed by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), for a three-year tenure beginning in 2021. International IDEA is an intergovernmental organization that supports sustainable democracy worldwide. The board of advisers of IDEA play the major role of advising the council of member states and the secretariat on matters of strategic importance.

Samson is the Executive Director of YIAGA Africa, a community of change-makers focused on building sustainable democracies in Africa. YIAGA promotes the principles of inclusion, justice, accountability and constitutionalism, which successfully lead the #NotTooYoungToRun movement.