91¿´Æ¬Íø

Crispian Olver is a public policy and management expert with extensive experience at senior management level in local government, environment and development issues. He is a medical doctor by training, and was a leader and activist in the anti-apartheid struggles during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Following the democratic elections in 1994, he held various senior management positions within the South African government, including Director General for the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism.

Nomvuyo Guma is an economist and public policy strategist with two decades of experience across government, banking, economic research and institutional reform. She previously served as Chief Director for Microeconomic Policy at South Africa’s National Treasury and as Co-head of Operation Vulindlela, the joint initiative of the Presidency and National Treasury established to accelerate priority structural reforms. In these roles, she helped shape and coordinate reforms across key network industries and contributed to major areas of government economic policy, including National Treasury’s strategy for economic transformation, inclusive growth and competitiveness.

Noncedo Madubedube is a social justice leader, movement strategist, and popular educator with over fifteen years of experience in grassroots organising, governance leadership, and rights-based advocacy in South Africa and globally. Her work centres on strengthening democratic participation and youth-led organising as key drivers in the struggle against structural inequality. She recently served as the General Secretary of Equal Education, a youth-led movement campaigning for quality and equality in South Africa’s public education system. During her tenure, she helped guide national and localised education campaigns, oversaw complex organisational governance systems, and fostered coalition-building across civil society, trade unions, researchers, lawyers, and grassroots formations working to advance the constitutional right to basic education.

Dewald van Rensburg is a practising journalist with 19 years’ experience across various publications. He has been with the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism since 2019, where he specialises in financial crime and exploitative business practices. He has won several industry awards, including the Taco Kuiper Award, African Investigative Journalist of the Year, and the TRACE Prize for investigative reporting on business-related bribery and financial crime, among others. He has published one book, VBS: A Dream Defrauded. His research covers various facets of South Africa’s inequality regime, including money laundering, the abuse of financial inclusion innovations, private sector corruption, fraud and tax evasion, as well as political funding.

Ngqabutho Nceku Mpofu (He/Him), commonly known as Butho has extensive experience in the South Africa civil society space, having worked in it for twelve years on the right to health and the right to basic education. He started at SECTION27 before moving to the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), working as the Policy, Communications, and Research Manager. Together with multiple comrades, Ngqabutho has been privileged to have worked on some of the most momentous issues and projects in the country since 2010, including but not limited to the Limpopo textbooks case, Life Esidimeni, and the Ritshidze project. He has also worked on membership and community literacy on issues such as the NHI Bill and on campaigns calling on the state to declare TB a national health emergency and access to medicines. Ngqabutho is passionate about promoting data-driven advocacy efforts in the Global South, assisting community-led monitoring efforts from Rwanda, Liberia, Cameroon, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. His research interests lie in the field of migration, with a specific interest in statelessness. His work at the SCIS will focus on looking at how some of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups - stateless people in South Africa - navigate space and access healthcare in the country. 

Mora Fernández is a Mexican ARTivist, consultant, human rights defender, survivor, and advocate for victims of child sexual abuse with 25 years of international experience creating innovative, disruptive, and radical advocacy and artistic projects to end rape culture, heal trauma, and change public policies. She is the Founder and CEO of La Casa Mandarina AC (Mexico) and co-director of FORCE: upsetting rape culture (Baltimore), both organisations devoted to ending sexual violence through ARTivism. Mora is the co-investigator of a research project with the University of York on artivist knowledge, resistance, and impact on sexual and gender violence in Mexico.

Sona Mitra is a feminist economist from India and currently the Director- Policy and Research at, an initiative of LEAD at Krea University, India. For the last two decades, she has worked in the area of women, labour, and development. She has extensively investigated the issues of women's labour force participation in the region, especially in India, engaging with the care economy, data on women's work, and gender-responsive budgeting. Sona's work at IWWAGE was very recently honoured at  the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on the Beijing+30 Review.

Sohini Shoaib is a queer feminist activist working for nearly a decade in the flood-ravaged Kosi-Seemanchal area of Bihar, one of the poorest states in the east of India. As part of a union of informal workers, Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan (JJSS), Shoaib works with landless labourers, marginal farmers, rural youth and other oppressed communities to help mobilise and unionise under people’s leadership, for people’s rights – whether they be those of land, labour, caste annihilation and gender justice, to address gaps in governance or violence by the State. Furthermore, Shoaib is a part of larger movements and campaigns around the right to work, food sovereignty, social security and health, transparency and accountability in governments, democratic rights and for queer and feminist interventions in the country. 

Dev Nathan is an economist working on the question of the enclosure or monopolization of knowledge and the creation of inequality, including global and gender inequality. His (co-authored) book Reverse Subsidies in Global Monopsony Capitalism: Labour, Gender and Environmental Injustice in Garment Value Chains (2022),  identified low wages, early expulsion of women from the factory workforce and low payment for environmental services and related environmental damage, as a form of reverse subsidy – extracted at the points of production in the Global South, but captured, through the mechanism of global monopsony, by lead/headquarter firms in the Global North. Combining research with advocacy, he co-authored the book Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Social Transformation  (2020) and became a co-convenor of the International Alliance to End Witch Hunts. He expects that his work at SCIS on Knowledge and Global Inequality will bring a neglected, dimension into the discussion on global, intra-national and gender inequality – the role of the enclosure or monopolization of knowledge and the differential social valuation of different domains of knowledge.

Ufrieda Ho is a Johannesburg-based journalist. She reports and writes on a broad range of issues including public health, climate change, the environment, and society. She is a fellow of the ALI (African Leadership Initiative) Bloomberg Media Initiative and is a recipient of the Anthony Sampson Foundation Award for Journalism. She is the author of Paper Sons and Daughters, (Pan Macmillan, 2011) - a memoir of growing up Chinese under apartheid.  The book touches on the themes of migration, xenophobia, identity and belonging. Ufrieda studied journalism at Tshwane University of Pretoria (Pretoria Technikon) and holds a BA (Hons) in Anthropology from 91¿´Æ¬Íø University. For Ufrieda, the Cameron Schrier Fellowship represents an opportunity to explore and deepen interdisciplinary approaches to bolster journalism and to reflect critically on where media stands in building stronger modern democracies. 

Dinga Sikwebu has been an activist since 1976 when he took part in the student uprising which engulfed South Africa for eight months. Since 1980, he has worked as a trade unionist, first joining a British multinational corporation, Metal Box. He has been associated with the labour movement as a member, shop-floor activist, researcher, educator, campaigner, and official. In 1995 he joined the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, where until recently he was head of the union’s education department. He now leads the union’s project “Regaining Workplace Power”, which is located in Numsa’s research department. Dinga is interested in the role that the labour movement can play in the fight against inequality, particularly the role that retirement trustees can play in shareholder activism and in dealing with inequality. 

Siya Myeza was born and grew up in the rural parts of Richards Bay, KwesakwaMthethwa. He completed his undergrad in Nature Conservation at Mangosuthu University of Technology in 2010. He practised his passion for conservation and natural resource management at Tembe Elephant Park, Drakensberg World Heritage Site, and iSimangaliso Wetland Park with Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife when he also completed his B Tech in 2013. Other passions that were inspired by being in nature were justice and sustainability. In pursuit of deepening his understanding, in 2014 he relocated to Nieuwoudtville, a small village in the Northern Cape joining the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG). Siya spent 4.5 years working with Suid Bokkeveld’s rooibos small-scale farmers on Sustainable Land Management, Climate Change Adaptation and agroecology. This deepened his appreciation for nature and the heart of marginalised communities. Currently, still with EMG, Siya works with marginalised communities in Cape Town around the environment and social justice, particularly the water and climate change nexus. Within this broad context of urban water, Siya is mainly interested in understanding the gendered access to water and the effects of climate change.

Semiha Arı is a feminist activist and researcher from Istanbul, Turkey. She has a BA in Political Science and Public Administration and MA in International Relations. The dissertation of her PhD study in Sociology (Anadolu University, Turkey), critically examines the current trends in women’s movement and organizing, focusing specifically on the impact of the escalating social and political conflicts in the Kurdish cities of Turkey. Her research interests include feminist/women’s social movements, women’s organizations, and women’s labor. In her studies on women’s labor, she has called into question the neoliberal turn as it manifests itself in microcredit programs and NGO-led development projects and elaborates on how NGOization has expanded the informal economy and accelerated fragmentation in the solidarity networks of women’s movement. Her writings regarding these issues have been published in various feminist journals and websites. She has also worked for a number of women’s organizations for many years, such as Women’s Labor and Employment Initiative Platform (KEIG). She is the former general coordinator of KEIG. In KEIG she has also contributed to various research projects and been a (co-)writer of publications the organization has made. Examples of their thematic focus can be listed to cover women’s cooperatives, unpaid work, economic crisis, and workplace conditions. Currently she is continuing with her research and works as an independent feminist activist.

Zeenat Sujee is an attorney and is currently employed as a law researcher at the Constitutional Court. She completed her LLB at 91¿´Æ¬Íø University and thereafter began her legal career at a civil society organisation. She served her articles of clerkship at the Legal Resources Centre, where she continued to practice as an attorney for 3 years. Thereafter, Zeenat joined the Centre for Applied Legal Studies where she litigated in the spheres of the right of access to housing, access to water, sanitation and electricity and the right to health. She has also done work relating to gender issues which include the adverse impacts of the lack of adequate housing and sanitation on women and girl learners in schools. 

Siyabonga (Siya) Myeza

Siya Myeza was born and grew up in the rural parts of Richards Bay, KwesakwaMthethwa. He completed his undergrad in Nature Conservation at Mangosuthu University of Technology in 2010. He practised his passion for conservation and natural resource management at Tembe Elephant Park, Drakensberg World Heritage Site, and iSimangaliso Wetland Park with Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife when he also completed his B Tech in 2013. Other passions that were inspired by being in nature were justice and sustainability. In pursuit of deepening his understanding, in 2014 he relocated to Nieuwoudtville, a small village in the Northern Cape joining the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG). Siya spent 4.5 years working with Suid Bokkeveld’s rooibos small-scale farmers on Sustainable Land Management, Climate Change Adaptation and agroecology. This deepened his appreciation for nature and the heart of marginalised communities. Currently, still with EMG, Siya works with marginalised communities in Cape Town around the environment and social justice, particularly the water and climate change nexus. Within this broad context of urban water, Siya is mainly interested in understanding the gendered access to water and the effects of climate change.

Dinga Sikwebu

Dinga Sikwebu has been an activist since 1976 when he took part in the student uprising which engulfed South Africa for eight months. Since 1980, he has worked as a trade unionist, first joining a British multinational corporation, Metal Box. He has been associated with the labour movement as a member, shop-floor activist, researcher, educator, campaigner, and official. In 1995 he joined the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, where until recently he was head of the union’s education department. He now leads the union’s project “Regaining Workplace Power”, which is located in Numsa’s research department. Dinga is interested in the role that the labour movement can play in the fight against inequality, particularly the role that retirement trustees can play in shareholder activism and in dealing with inequality. 

Zeenat Sujee 

Zeenat Sujee is an attorney and is currently employed as a law researcher at the Constitutional Court. She completed her LLB at 91¿´Æ¬Íø University and thereafter began her legal career at a civil society organisation. She served her articles of clerkship at the Legal Resources Centre, where she continued to practice as an attorney for 3 years. Thereafter, Zeenat joined the Centre for Applied Legal Studies where she litigated in the spheres of the right of access to housing, access to water, sanitation and electricity and the right to health. She has also done work relating to gender issues which include the adverse impacts of the lack of adequate housing and sanitation on women and girl learners in schools. 

Dr Semiha Ari

Semiha Arı is a feminist activist and researcher from Istanbul, Turkey. She has a BA in Political Science and Public Administration and MA in International Relations. The dissertation of her PhD study in Sociology (Anadolu University, Turkey), critically examines the current trends in women’s movement and organizing, focusing specifically on the impact of the escalating social and political conflicts in the Kurdish cities of Turkey. Her research interests include feminist/women’s social movements, women’s organizations, and women’s labor. In her studies on women’s labor, she has called into question the neoliberal turn as it manifests itself in microcredit programs and NGO-led development projects and elaborates on how NGOization has expanded the informal economy and accelerated fragmentation in the solidarity networks of women’s movement. Her writings regarding these issues have been published in various feminist journals and websites. She has also worked for a number of women’s organizations for many years, such as Women’s Labor and Employment Initiative Platform (KEIG). She is the former general coordinator of KEIG. In KEIG she has also contributed to various research projects and been a (co-)writer of publications the organization has made. Examples of their thematic focus can be listed to cover women’s cooperatives, unpaid work, economic crisis, and workplace conditions. Currently she is continuing with her research and works as an independent feminist activist.