The Members of the Jury 2011
Khalil Gueye
Guèye has played a key role in the development of television, radio and the freedom of the press in Senegal over the past twenty years. He began his television and broadcasting career at Senegal’s national television station, Radiodiffusion Television du Senegal (RTS), where he wrote and hosted several television and radio programmes. He has also worked for Canal France International, WTN, BET and CNN. Khalil was the local producer in Senegal for CBS’s renowned reality TV show The Amazing Race and has written and produced several powerful documentaries, including The Broken Souls, a film about the situation of women and little girls - victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In February 2007, Khalil launched News Box Network, Africa’s first professional online television station (www.nbnlive.com). Today, Khalil is as an international broadcaster for NBN, the Voice of America and CNN International's World View and covers events taking place in Senegal or elsewhere in Africa. He also heads Openrange, a Communication and Media Strategy company in Washington D.C.
Dr Caroline Pontefract
Dr Caroline Pontefract is currently the Director of Education for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency where she oversees one of the largest education systems in the Middle East, which serves 500,000 Palestine refugee students yearly. Her current role in UNRWA, a post supported by UNESCO, is responsible for the overall reform of UNRWA’s education programme in areas which include teachers professional development, educational planning and management, inclusive education and TVET. Prior to this, Dr Pontefract was the Director for the Social Transformation Programme Division in the Commonwealth Secretariat, based in London. The division supported Commonwealth countries in education, health and gender initiatives. Dr Caroline Pontefract joined UNESCO as Chief of Section in the Section for Teacher Education in September 2006. Before joining UNESCO, she spent two years at the African Development Bank in Tunisia, where she served as a Principal Education Analyst on a number of national and regional education programs. She also worked with the DFID Imfundo ICT for Education in Africa partnership initiative at DFID headquarters in London. This initiative worked with international and local partners, including representatives of the private sector, academic world and civil society in collaboration with Ministries of Education, most specifically in the areas of teacher education and EMIS. Prior to this, Dr Pontefract was with DFID in Kenya and Ghana, where she worked to provide technical support to the design and implementation of national education programmes and structures in the fields of distance learning for teachers and textbook provision/selection.
Catherine Ngugi
Catherine Ngugi is the Project Director of OER Africa. Prior to holding this post, she established the African Virtual University’s Research & Innovation Facility (RIF) in January 2005 and managed it until September 2007. During this period, the RIF hosted two OER projects and launched a Pan-African pilot study on the use of OER in African universities. Catherine holds an MA from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Catherine began her career in the private sector, working for a multinational manufacturer. In 1997, she relocated to Dakar, Senegal to work with CODESRIA (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), where she initiated and coordinated a grants management system and designed the CODESRIA Endowment Plan. Upon joining Oxfam GB, she conducted regional training sessions (Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania) in project sustainability across the organization’s regional group and facilitated the funding by SIDA (Swedish International Donor Agency) of the Oxfam GB West Africa Regional Girls Education Program.
A Rockefeller Associate of the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, Catherine has worked as a consultant in higher education and the Arts to various international organizations headquartered in Nairobi. Her work has been published in Kwani and in the Journal of African Cultural Studies. She has co-edited various publications including the eight country report on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and Higher Education in Africa commissioned by the Centre for Educational Technology (CET) for the Educational Technology Initiative of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA).
Sauda Simba
Sauda Simba is the Managing Director of Trinity Promotions Limited, a multimedia communications agency which provides consultancy services for international corporate organisations and the creative sector. Prior to founding the firm, she worked for Tanzania Breweries Limited as Public Relations Manager from 2000-2002 and Brand Manager from 2002-2004. She then worked for Barrick Gold Tanzania from 2004-2006 before moving to the DRC to work as Public and Communications Manager for Canadian exploration company Africo Resources in Katanga Province. She returned to Tanzania in 2008. Ms Simba also has several years’ experience as a news anchor with Independent Television Tanzania and from time to time writes features for the various newspapers in circulation. She is the coordinator for the Danish cultural programmes and has written several children’s books. She has also acted in a number of productions and has two music CDs on the national and international markets. She holds a Bachelor of Science (Moderatorship) degree from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Rebecca Stromeyer
Rebecca Stromeyer is the Managing Director and founder of ICWE GmbH and Chairman of the Board of the award-winning web portal Internet Course Finders, which is dedicated to education and offers information on all types of educational institutions worldwide. She is also a co-founder and shareholder of ICEF GmbH, the recognized global leader in international student recruitment and travel for education workshops.
Rebecca grew up in an international environment and was raised multilingually. She was born in Kuwait and spent most of her formative years in different countries in the Middle East, the longest time spent in Lebanon. She studied Slavonic Studies, Comparative Literature, Business Administration and Media Studies in Berlin, Moscow and the UK. This background provided the basis for her first successful exhibition series on languages and multiculturalism, which have been organised in a number of European countries such as Berlin, Budapest, London, Warsaw, Moscow and Prague since 1988.
Over the last decade and a half, Rebecca Stromeyer has been organising events related to education and training, as well as languages and media in all parts of the world. Her most prestigious enterprise to date is the ONLINE EDUCA conference series whose flagship, ONLINE EDUCA Berlin, she helped launch in 1995. The annual conference is regarded as the key networking event of the international e-learning industry. ONLINE EDUCA MADRID, first held in 2000, has expanded the palette to the Spanish-speaking e-learning community.
Her latest project, eLearning Africa, responds to the need for ICT-supported education and training on this exciting continent. The first edition of this annual international conference on ICT for Development, Education and Training was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2006. It was followed by subsequent editions in Nairobi, Accra, Dakar and Lusaka. The conference is attended by over 1500 delegates from all sectors and ministers from many African nations.
As a founding director of E-Cubed Communications, she believes that the company can help its clients to make the most of new opportunities in the rapidly expanding international markets for education, training, culture and language.
Rebecca is an advisory member to ELIG and a board member of GDLN Global.
Connecting people to enhance the educational process is Rebecca Stromeyer's main focus.