Focus: Democracy
Jad Maalouf
Jad Maalouf is a judicial inspector with the Lebanese Judicial Inspection Commission, which is tasked with monitoring the judiciary and investigating and prosecuting corruption and misconduct. Jad is dedicated to working with public institutions to initiate and implement sustainable reforms and to promote integrity and transparency. For the past decade, he has focused on anti-corruption work and participated in drafting some of the main laws that have been enacted to combat and prevent systemic corruption and to increase transparency and access to information. He also leads a team working on the Implementation Review Mechanism for the UNCAC and the corruption risk assessment of laws and regulations. Jad’s work focuses on…
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Dayo Olopade
Dayo Olopade works at the intersection of media and technology, with more than a decade of content, strategy, product, communications, partnerships, contracts, and change management expertise. As Partnerships Lead at YouTube, she structures and negotiates product and licensing deals with video storytellers–major TV broadcasters and cable networks, sports leagues, movie studios, digital native publishers, and fresh, individual voices. She gets to do this across Africa, where the content industry is dynamic and creative problem solving is fundamental. Dayo began her career as a reporter in Washington covering politics, policy, and the Obama administration. She spent two years in Nairobi as a New America Foundation fellow, reporting The Bright Continent, a…
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Rami Nakhla
Rami Nakhla, also known by his alias Malath Aumran, is a long time democratic advocate who works on political reform in Syria and the Middle East since the mid-2000s. In 2012 and due to the increased dominance of Islamic radicals in the Syrian uprising, Rami resigned from all his political positions to focus on a nonpartisan pursuit of peace and democracy in Syria. Currently, he is working with tech companies to leverage disruptive new technologies and channel them toward positive social impact. Rami has played a prominent role in the leadership of the Syrian democratic movement, serving as a spokesperson for the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) of Syria and as…
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Norbert Mao
Norbert Mao is a lawyer and politician currently serving as President of the Democratic Party, Uganda's oldest political party. Norbert ran for president in the 2011 Uganda General Elections, emerging third in a field of eight candidates. One of Uganda’s most outspoken advocates for democracy and human rights, Norbert continues to be featured regularly as a speaker in national and international events. He was a Member of Parliament for ten years and most recently the highest elected leader in the Gulu Local Government in Northern Uganda. In that capacity he was a key player in the peace process with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). He continues to champion post-conflict reconstruction…
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Alexey Navalny
Alexey Navalny is the leader of Russian opposition and the founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. He has become well-known for his anti-corruption investigations against Russian state corporations and senior officials. Alexey participated in Russian presidential election in 2018, and in the course of the campaign he opened 81 regional headquarters all over the country. 41 of them are currently in operation, which makes his network the biggest opposition organization in Russia. In August 2020 Alexey was attacked with a Novichok nerve agent by Russian operatives and later sentenced to 9 years in a maximum security penal colony on charges of fraud and contempt of court. Due to fabrications of criminal cases,…
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Adamu Musa
Adamu Musa is Founder and Managing Director of AM Communications, an international consultancy in strategic and crisis communications, governance, and investment guidance in public policy and management. He is a well-known media and communications figure in Cameroon, where for more than 25 years he anchored the national prime time news broadcast by the Cameroon Radio Television Corporation (CRTV) and created and anchored two high-profile investigative news magazine programs, X-TRA MILE and CRTV CLUB. He also carried out authoritative investigations on corruption, human rights abuses, governance lapses and other societal ills. Adamu also anchored a popular CRTV flagship weekly radio program, CAMEROON CALLING. He managed a news service of both English…
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Gemma Mortensen
Gemma Mortensen is an award-winning social entrepreneur and thinker and practitioner interested in transformative, systemic change. She is Co-Founder and Vice-Chair of More In Common and a Trustee of Bite Back 2030 and The HALO Trust. She is currently working on The New Constellation, a project to help people make transformational leaps towards regenerative social, political, and economic models. Gemma was previously Chief Global Officer at Change.org, the world’s largest platform for social change, CEO of Crisis Action, an organization that won the MacArthur Award and Skoll Award for its innovative systems model, and she co-chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Council on systems leadership. She has also worked in…
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Leonid Volkov
Leonid Volkov is a Russian politician of the Russia’s Future Party. Leonid was campaign manager and chief of staff for Alexei Navalny’s 2013 mayoral campaign for Moscow, as well as Alexei Navalny’s attempt to get registered for the 2018 presidential election. Currently, Leonid oversees all regional political operations of the Russia’s Future Party over Russia’s 11 time zones. He is a former deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma and the head of the central election committee of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council. Leonid has over 20 years of experience as an IT professional, running and consulting several of Russia’s largest software firms. Together with Fyodor Krasheninnikov he published three editions…
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Ibrahim "Ben" Suffian
Ibrahim "Ben" Suffian is an entrepreneur and innovator in the public polling sector where he has contributed significantly to better governance, policy development, citizen outreach, and democratic processes within Malaysia’s political system. He co-founded the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research in 2004. The Center has become a central player in Malaysian national politics by improving the quality of public debate, widening public participation in the political process, and contributing to the formation of a more coherent civil society.
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Kanbar Hossein-Bor
Kanbar Hossein-Bor is a senior British diplomat and international lawyer currently serving as Deputy High Commissioner for the UK in Bangladesh. He has held a number of posts, both as a lawyer and diplomat, including in the Netherlands as the head of international law team and UK agent to International Court of Justice, Iraq as the head of the human rights team, Libya, and Liberia, where he was briefly deployed as Head of Mission during the Ebola crisis. Kanbar has successfully led UK delegations in multilateral conferences and meetings, including in Vienna, Geneva, Kampala, and New York. He has also led and facilitated working groups in the International Criminal Court…
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