Aden Abdi

Fanny Bessem is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Favour Lowcost Healthcare Foundation with over 6 years of community development and humanitarian work. She is a consultant, trainer, public speaker, mentor and mediator. She has experience in humanitarian mediation such as mediating and negotiating access to food and healthcare services to internally displaced persons affected by the current crisis in the Anglophone regions of Cameroon.

Florence Mpaayei is the senior advisor and coordinator of peace-building practice at Hekima Institute for Peace Studies and International Relations. A seasoned conflict transformation and peacebuilding professional, Florence has extensive experience in designing strategies for intervention and implementing peacebuilding programmes. She has worked in numerous countries building the capacities of peace actors and particularly women in dialogue, negotiation, mediation, and mentoring young women peacebuilders.

Shree Nadarajah has more than a decade of experience working with the United Nations on issues of children and armed conflict, and conflict-related sexual violence. She has undertaken missions to several conflict settings such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. In 2014 – 2017, Shree led the engagement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in implementing the UN-MILF agreement on preventing and addressing the recruitment and use of children resulting in the successful disengagement of 1,869 children associated with the group.

Hannah Forster is a trained mediator and has over 17 years of experience in the field of conflict management. Hannah was involved in the design of and implementation of the African Transformative Justice Project which was a mediation and peacebuilding project within 4 communities in the Gambia. Recently she has been working on issues related to UNSCR 1325 in participation with the office of the African Union, as well as in collaboration with WANEP, Platforme des Femmes pour la Paix en Casamance (PFPC) and the Working Group on Women, Youth, Peace and Security in West Africa.

Justina Mike Ngwobia is the Executive Director of Justice, Peace and Reconciliation Movement in Nigeria, the Founder of the Women Peace Builders Network, and the co-chair Women Peace Mentors and Mediators Forum. She holds a Master degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Jos, and a certificate in Peace and Conflict Studies for the West Africa Peacebuilding Institute in Ghana. Justina is also a fellow of KAICCID, in Vienna.

Emine Colak has been involved in mediation, negotiation and facilitation for over 20 years. In the lead up to the referendum on the Annan Plan 2003 – 2004, she was appointed on behalf of Turkish Cypriots to coordinate committees working to reach consensus on the plan. Emine was among the founders of the Turkish Cypriot Mediation Association which carried out awareness-raising, education and mediation services based on the benefits of mediation as an alternative dispute resolving technique.

Betty Bigombe has played a key role in conflict resolution in Africa. She led the peace and humanitarian efforts in northern Uganda, first in the 1990s as Minister of State for Northern Uganda and later in her private capacity as a chief mediator to the conflict in the mid-2000s. She has been a visiting scholar at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, distinguished African Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace consulting on the impact of war and violence.

Barbara Sangare (Bangura) is a peace activist with more than twenty years experience in community peacebuilding, peace processes and WPS, with particular expertise on elections violence and mediation. She established and coordinated a women’s NGO called Grassroots Empowerment for Self-Reliance (GEMS) in Sierra Leone from 1998 to 2012 through which she trained community women on peacebuilding and mediated in community peace and reconciliation processes after the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone.

Dudziro Nhengu is a governance, gender, peace, security and conflict resolution practitioner and scholar. Dudziro has worked on personal empowerment, resilience building and community relations transformation with academic institutions, security sector actors, civil society, international organisations, community women, traditional leaders, youth and market women across Sub-Saharan Africa.