Edith K. Ackermann is a Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Aix-Marseille, and a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, MA. She coaches graduate students, conducts research, and consults for companies, institutions, and organizations interested in the intersections between learning, teaching, design, and digital technologies. Edith serves as a member of the learning-team for “one laptop per child”.

Seni M. Adio - Seni is an Attorney-at-Law and a member of the Nigerian Bar, as well as those of New York and Massachusetts in the United States of America. He has held senior executive positions in both business and law related capacities, namely as Chief Corporate Services Officer and later Managing Director of a gaming and entertainment company.Notably, before returning to Nigeria, Seni practiced law at the international law firm of MINTZ LEVIN in Boston, Massachusetts, where he achieved the remarkable feat of becoming a Litigation Partner. While in the United States, he counselled multinational publicly-held conglomerates and private companies on various matters, including but not limited to, Fiduciary Law and Corporate Governance; Legislative and Regulatory Matters before the U.S. Congress; Intellectual Property Law; Internet Technology and Security; Insurance and Coverage Disputes; and Business Torts (including Unfair Trade Practices, Commercial Libel and Breach of Contract).
Seni has provided commentaries on issues of business, law and racial diversity to various media outfits, including the Associated Press (AP), CBS Marketwatch, Boston Magazine and the Washington, DC based Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Magazine. He is active in civic organizations, and served as a Trustee of certain non-profit institutions in the academic, healthcare, economic-empowerment and ecumenical arenas. He has also been a speaker at international conferences/seminars, including the American Bar Association Annual Meeting, and was a moderator at a symposium at the Harvard Club in New York concerning privatisation in Nigeria.

Juma Assiago is a social scientist by profession, Mr Assiago is an urban safety and youth expert with UN HABITAT. He joined UN-HABITAT in 1999, working in the area of urban safety and youth programming. He is tasked with assisting governments and other city stakeholders to build capacities at the city level to adequately address urban insecurity and to contribute to the establishment of a culture of prevention in developing countries. He has served in various UN inter-agency coordinating processes and technically supported various international youth crime prevention and governance processes. He is also involved in developing youth safety tools and approaches in urban contexts. His main thematic area of focus is on the use of social, institutional and situational crime prevention measures to reduce youth crime and delinquency in cities. He has also participated and presented papers in several international conferences on youth and children empowerment. He is also currently involved in the strategic planning process of the Safer Cities Programme which among others is defining the key role of Hip Hop in urban development and developing a network structure taking into consideration the governance of safety and safety in public spaces.

Mulatu Astatke -Ethiopia

Walter Bender is President, software and content, of the One Laptop per Child foundation, a not-for-profit association that is developing and deploying technologies that will revolutionize how the world’s children engage in learning. Before taking his leave of absence from MIT Bender was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory. He was also former holder of the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. Bender is a senior research scientist and director of the Electronic Publishing group. Mr. Bender also directed the Gray Matters special interest group, which focuses on technology’s impact on the aging population. In 1992, Mr. Bender founded the News in the Future consortium and has been a member of the Lab’s Simplicity, Things That Think, and Digital Life consortia. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1977. Mr. Bender joined the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1978. He received his MS at MIT in 1980. A founding member of the Media Laboratory, throughout his career, Mr. Bender has engaged in the study of new information technologies, particularly those that affect people directly. Much of the research addresses the idea of building upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extending them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction. He has participated in much of the pioneering research in the field of electronic publishing and personalized interactive multimedia.

Trenton Birch - Trenton Birch is one of the pioneers of the new African music movement. He has just recorded his debut album. He runs Black Mango Music - an afro-centric record label as well as the company “Afrolution” which includes Afrolution Records – an African Hip Hop label, www.africanhiphopshop.com - the worlds first online store dedicated to selling African Hip Hop downloads and is about to launch www.africanhiphoptv.com. Trenton is from Johannesburg South Africa although he spent much of his childhood growing up in Kenya and Nigerian.

Jimmie Briggs, Goodwill Ambassador and UN Special Envoy for Children & Armed Conflict. Goodwill Ambassador and Special Envoy for Children and Armed Conflict by WAFUNIF at the UN.
He has worked for the UN Special Session on Children and Seeds of Peace in both New York City and Kabul, Afghanistan, among other organizations. He has received several fellowships for his writing and advocacy. Briggs’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, People, Vibe, Bust, and Fortune, and hprofessor of investigative journalism at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War”, a culmination of over six years of painstaking, investigative journalism. The book chronicles the personal stories of several child soldiers who participated in conflicts within the countries of Afghanistan, Uganda, Rwanda, Columbia, and Sri Lanka.

Murray Forman - Murray Forman is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University in Boston and a frequent media correspondent on HipHop and society. He is the author of The Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (2002) and Co-editor of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). His main research interests are HipHop culture, media, race, and youth.

Jean-Christophe Henry is graduate student at Indiana University in an African American and African Diaspora Studies and is also earning his second Masters degree in History from The Universite de Provence Aix Marseille I (France) focusing on the present-time history of Somalia. Intern for the Black Film Center/ Archives at Indiana University Henry is also interested in filmmaking and has recently co-produced a documentary for PBS entitled “Rev.Butler: Rebel With a Cause” on the late Reverend Ernest D. Butler, a pivotal figure in the struggle for Civil Rights in the Bloomington community. Henry is currently working on his thesis engaging the condition of Africans in France , the struggles and cultural responses to racism and forced migration through the work of Western African Hip-Hop artists such as Didier Awadi(Senegal). JC Henry is an advocate for the struggle against neo-colonialism and militates against the abuses of the “Francafrique” politics.

Mustafa Maluka studied graphic design at the Peninsula Technikon. He held two solo exhibitions and was included on numerous group shows in the late 1990s in Cape Town. He subsequently moved to Amsterdam in late 1998 where he studied at De Ateliers, and was enrolled as a PhD candidate at ASCA (the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam). He returned to South Africa in May 2004. In September 2004 he was included on the group exhibition Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art in New York, at the Cathedral of St John the Divine and the Museum for African Art, travelling to The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, in 2006. He was the winner of the 2004 Tollman Award for a young artist. In July 2005 he attended a residency at Art OMI in New York. Recent group exhibitions include Cape 07 (2007); the 7th S„o Paulo Bienal (2006); What Lies Beneath at Galerie Mikael Andersen in Copenhagen, Denmark (2006); Nie Meer at De Warande in Turnhout, Belgium (2006) and New Painting at the KZNSA Gallery, Unisa Gallery and Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006).

Mbugua wa Mungai, is a lecturer in the Literature Department of Kenyatta University. A folklorist by training, he is the author of many articles on Kenyan
popular culture, the history of folklore research in Kenya, and the “matatu men” whose performances enliven Nairobi’s public transportation.

Joseph Ogidi Oyoo - resides in Kenya. He is the founder of Street Expressions and member of the UN Habitat Messenger of Truth Project.Alex Perullo - is an assistant professor of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African studies at Bryant University. His research focuses on urban centers in eastern Africa, neo-liberalism, and the music industry. In addition to several articles on youth, music, and intellectual property rights in eastern Africa, he is working on a manuscript about Tanzania’s contemporary music industry.

Damien Pwono - is the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Global Initiative on Arts, Culture, and Society. Damien holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh. He has worked on culture and development issues globally for over a decade, including 11 years in arts and culture philanthropy. He is a former Senior Program Advisor for the arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York and Nairobi (1993-98) and Program Officer for media, arts and culture at the Ford Foundation in New York (1998-2003). Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, Damian was a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh and volunteered as the Secretary General of the International Music Council at UNESCO in Paris.

Thomas Gesthuizen a.k.a. Juma4 (J4) is editor of Africanhiphop.com, a web platform promoting hip hop from the African continent which was set up in 1997, and chairman of the African hip hop foundation, a non-profit organization. He does freelance consultancy for multimedia productions, festivals and musical exchanges including the Rough Guide to African Rap cd, Couleur Cafe, Festival Mundial. In 1999 together with Martin Meulenberg he made the documentary ‘Hali Halisi - rap as an alternative medium in Tanzania’ which was awarded Best Documentary Short at 2004’s edition of H2O Hip Hop Film Festival in New York. He is a spokesperson for the African hip hop community for international media such as Newsweek, Le Monde Diplomatique, BBC, XXL Magazine and Allhiphop.com. He presents and produces the international web radio show African Hip Hop Radio which recently got a Dutch language version on Dutch public radio, is editor of Dutch hip hop website theBoombap.nl, manages the Tanzanian Maasai hip hop group X Plastaz, directs videos for African rappers and occasionally plays as a club dj. He is also part of the web developing team of Baobabconnections.org.

Scott Heath is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University, where he specializes in contemporary African American literature, black public culture, and speculative race theory. He recently coedited the first hip hop studies issue of Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters and he is currently completing a book titled Head Theory: Hip Hop Discourse and Black Public Culture.

Joel Isabirye - Joel Isabirye resides in Uganda. He is a Ugandan music historian and DJ. He talks about the role of music throughout Uganda’s history, from kingdoms to state-sponsored bands. He also shares the pain of growing up in the 1990s as HIV/AIDS was ravaging the nation

Emmanuel Jal – Former Child Soldier from Sudan, Emmanuel resides in England and was born in the village of Tong (also known as Tony) in southern Sudan and recruited as a child to fight in Sudan’s civil war. The depth of his message of peace, born out of such a visceral experience of war, is matched only by his generosity of vision. “What I have gone through and where I have been should encourage other people to realize that they can be saved, too,” Jal said in a USA Today interview. Or, to quote one of his songs, “From Kenya to Australia / Tanzania, Asia and Pakistan / you need love to stand / Peace is a product of Love.”

Emile Jansen - resides in South Africa and is founding member of the legendary South African Hip Hop Group, Black Noise. Emile is a teacher at Battswood Primary and uses hip hop as an educational tool. He originated the T.E.A.A.C.H Project (The Educational Alternative Awakening Corrupted Heads), a series of community based discussions addressing “vital issues facing our people” which was subsequently “adopted by the group as a means to re-educate people to the proud past the black people have and to make them aware that respect for our people by themselves and others will only be attained if we know our past and supply our people with black role models that they can aspire to.”
Jansen also initiated Heal the Hood, a touring school-based project that promotes “respect for being African and using these talents responsibly for the benefit of Africa.” In this project discussions with school children are followed by poetry, rap, songs and drama from pupils dealing with critical issues. Subsequently “Heal the Hood” has become an overall framework or concept for many of their projects. Jansen has also played a central role in organizing the African Hip-Hop Indaba/Expo and in organising African Battle Cry, a series of workshops dealing with hip-hop.

Francis Abiola Irele - is from Nigeria, where he was Professor of French at the University of Ibadan, and served from 1977 to 1980, and from 1983 to 1987, as Head of the Department of Modern Languages. Previously, he has held positions at the University of Lagos, the University of Ghana, Legon, and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria. From 1987 to 2003, he was Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at Ohio State University, and Editor for Research in African Literatures (1992 to 2003). He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar during the 1979-1980 academic year, and in 1999, he held an appointment as Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Professor Irele also spent the Fall semester of the year 2001 as Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Professor Irele pursued a degree in English at University College Ibadan, graduating in 1960 with honors from the University of London, and, in 1966, went on to obtain a doctorate degree from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) with a dissertation on the poetry of Aimé Césaire.

Alex Kirya

Dr. Judith Palfrey - is the Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at Children’s hospital and the T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She is actively involved in community medicine programs in Boston and throughout the United States. At Children’s Hospital, she directs service activities in child health and advocacy, as well as a fellowship training program and several research projects. She has a special interest in programs for children with disabilities.

Kay Shelemay - is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan.

Gavin Sheppard is a connector. An innovative and creative thinker he finds his passion in helping good people accomplish great things. He is the co-founder of The Remix Project, The Grassroots Youth Collaborative, The South Etobicoke Youth Assembly, and of The Rawluck Movement. He has been a manager to recording artists and producers on an independent and major label level in Canada and a consultant for countless artists, companies, NGO’s and governments. Gavin is a current member of the Mayor’s Community Safety Secretariat in Toronto, Canada and has worked or consulted for people as diverse as the Harbourfront Cultural Centre, The City of Toronto, The Department of Canadian Heritage, and The Ontario Provincial Government and Terra Encantada an IBISS project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Gavin is currently the chair of the Youth Engagement Committee at The Laidlaw Foundation and an active board member of Schools Without Borders.

Doris Sommer - is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University. Professor Sommer’s research Interests have developed from the 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate new republics in Latin America through the particular aesthetics of minoritarian literature, including bilingual virtuosity, to her current more general pursuit of the constructive work in rights and resources that the arts and the humanities contribute to developing societies. She is author of: Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (University of California Press, 1991); Proceed with Caution When Engaging Minority Literature (Harvard UP, 1999); Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke University Press, 2004); Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, Palgrave, 2004); and Cultural Agency in the Americas edited by Doris Sommer (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education; she has B.A. from New Jersey’s Douglass College for Women, M.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and her Ph.D. is from Rutgers The State University.

Julia Reynolds

Guy-Richard is originally from Rwanda, but has lived in Kenya all his life. He is currently a third-year student at MIT, majoring in Computer Science. His areas of interest include computer and cellular networks, interfaces and peer-to-peer technologies. He strongly believes in the power of information and communication technology as a means to foster development. During MIT’s Independent Activities Period of 2008,† he designed and implemented a wireless community network based on mesh technology in Kigali, Rwanda connecting a clinic, small businesses, and homes to the internet. He strongly feels that the OLPC project is crucial as it will set standards and a model to follow for future projects involving technology specifically geared towards developing countries.

Marang Setshwaelo is a writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa and founder of Dreamcathcer Multi Media.

Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University. Professor Sommer’s research Interests have developed from the 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate new republics in Latin America through the particular aesthetics of minoritarian literature, including bilingual virtuosity, to her current more general pursuit of the constructive work in rights and resources that the arts and the humanities contribute to developing societies. She is author of: Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (University of California Press, 1991); Proceed with Caution When Engaging Minority Literature (Harvard UP, 1999); Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke University Press, 2004); Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, Palgrave, 2004); and Cultural Agency in the Americas edited by Doris Sommer (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education; she has B.A. from New Jersey’s Douglass College for Women, M.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and her Ph.D. is from Rutgers The State University.

Honorable Frederick Sumaye - former Prime Minister of Tanzania since the first multi-party elections on 28 November 28, 1995 until December 30, 2005, making him the longest-serving Prime Minister in the country’s history.

Emily Ullman

Alex de Waal is a British writer and researcher on African issues. He is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, as well as program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York City. De Waal is also a co-director of Justice Africa, London. De Waal received a D.Phil. in social anthropology at the University of Oxford for his thesis on the 1984-5 Darfur famine in Sudan. The next year he joined the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, only to resign in December 1992 in protest for HRW’s support for the American military involvement in Somalia. He was the first chairman of the Mines Advisory Group at the beginning of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From 1997 to 2001, he focused on avenues to peaceful resolution of the Second Sudanese Civil War. In 2001, he returned to his work on health in Africa, writing on the intersection of HIV/AIDS, poverty and drought. In 2004, he returned to his doctoral thesis topic of Darfur as the conflict there worsened. During 2005 and 2006, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur.

Geoff Ward is Assistant Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty he was Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, and Visiting Scholar in the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, where he was coordinator of the Africana Criminal Justice Project. Dr. Ward holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan (2001), and B.A. in Sociology from Hampton University (1994).
Professor Ward’s scholarship focuses on racial stratification in contexts of criminal social control, with concentration on the racial history of American juvenile justice, the study of juvenile and adult court organizations, and issues of ethnoracial group representation in justice-related occupations. He received the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship from the National Institute of Justice to conduct a national study of the significance of federal court workgroup racial diversity to disparities in federal sentencing. He is presently completing a book titled, The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy in American Juvenile Justice, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. He is on the Advisory Board of the Institute on Race and Justice based at Northeastern University and the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Criminal Justice Research Network at Ohio State University.
Professor Ward is also affiliated with several community-based social justice and youth service organizations. He is on the Board of Directors for both the Justice George L. Ruffin Society, an association of minority justice professionals, and Roxbury YouthWorks, a United Way organization providing reintegration services to formerly incarcerated youth in Boston, Massachusetts.

James Wamba resides in Tanzania and is an African Hip Hop producer and Hip Hop artist.

Alec Wargo serves as Program Officer in the Office of the Special Representative for Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict. Before his current post, he also spent three years working at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo as a Child Protection Adviser. His first posts with the UN were working with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where he, too, worked to protect and improve the lives of children whether in East Timor or on the Guinean border. Alec also spent two years at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as a human rights and human rights and democratization officer in Bosnia mission. Alec received his B.A. in International Studies from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his M.A. in International Relations from McGill University in Montreal.

Dagmawi Woubshet - is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on African-American and African literature and culture. Woubshet is currently working on a project that considers the creative responses to the AIDS catastrophe, particularly in the United States, South Africa, and Ethiopia. He’s also the author of a forthcoming memoir, “New Flower.”

Nicholas You - Senior Advisor Policy & Strategic Planning Office of the Executive Director UN HABITAT.

Mohamed Yunus - Mohamed Yunus Rafiq is a Tanzanian social activist and co-founder of Aang Serian Peace Village in the city of Arusha. A 600-member youth organization representing 33 tribes of Tanzania and neighboring countries, Aang Serian serves indigenous youth through programs, which instill confidence and reaffirm identity and community in an increasingly urbanized East Africa. Among the organization’s notable achievements that Yunus has been directly involved with is the establishment of a recording studio with Gsan Rutta of famed Maasai hip hop group X Plastaz [featured in Vibe Magazine, 2001]. Here, indigenous youth are given the opportunity to record for posterity the vanishing wisdom and knowledge of Tanzanian tribes expressed in not only their traditional music forms but the burgeoning local hip hop sound infused with tribal elements. Yunus himself is an adviser to the Masai Hip Hop collective, which maintains close tied to Aang Serian. Through his efforts with both groups, Yunus has demonstrated his commitment to increasing the international platform for indigenous hip hop artists in Tanzania and elsewhere, from the International Meeting on Research Initiative for Traditional Anti-Malarials [1999], Festival of Traditional Medicine [2000], and The Assembly of Indigenous People [2003]. Additionally, he co founded the online forum Native Hip hop, which brings Indigenous Hip hop artists activists, and supporters together to network and promote collaborative endeavors.