Founder and Advisory Board Member

Dr Nkosana Moyo

Dr. Nkosana Moyo is the Founder of MINDS. He was until August 2011, the Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, African Development Bank. Nkosana Moyo is a national of Zimbabwe. He holds a PhD in Physics from Imperial College, University of London and an MBA from Cranfield School of Management, UK, an Eisenhower fellow.

Before joining the AfDB, Dr. Moyo worked at Actis Capital LLP as Managing Partner for the Africa Business (http://www.act.is). He also served on the boards of a number of companies in the cement, sugar, finance, tourism, mining, airline and food sectors. He also served as Minister of Industry & International Trade of Zimbabwe. For three years, Nkosana was the Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum – Africa Regional Agenda Council on the Future of Africa (www.weforum.org).

He was a Founding Trustees of the Investment Climate Facility (ICF) (www.icfafrica.org); and is on the Board of the Africa Leadership Institute (www.alinstitute.org).

In the Tertiary Education sector, Dr. Moyo has served as an Advisory Board Member of the London Business School (www.london.edu) as well as the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (www.soas.ac.uk).

Dr. Moyo was the first Executive Chair of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies.

Trustee & CHAIRPERSON

Mrs Graça Machel

Graça Machel is an African stateswoman whose decades long professional and public life is rooted in Mozambique’s struggle for self-rule and international advocacy for women and children’s rights. She is a former freedom fighter in Mozambique’s FRELIMO movement and that country’s first Minister of Education.

In the years following her tenure in government, Machel produced a ground-breaking UNICEF report “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children” that changed the way the United Nations and member states respond in conflict zones. Since then, she has worked tirelessly in support of global health, child welfare, and women’s rights and empowerment.

Machel works through several regional and international development bodies to accelerate social change. Machel is a founding member of The Elders, and played a key role in establishing Girls Not Brides. She is a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Sustainable Development Goals Advocacy Group and sits on the High-Level Steering Group for Every Woman Every Child.

Machel lends her expertise to a number of organizations in a governance role. She serves as Board Chair of the Africa Child Policy Forum, Board Chair of the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes, as well as Vice Chair of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies. Machel is a Board Member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and Education Above All. She is a Champion for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health. She is also the Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, Chancellor of the African Leadership University and the President of SOAS.

Machel has created three non-governmental organizations in her own right. She founded and serves as President of the Foundation for Community Development and the Zizile Institute for Child Development. She founded the Graça Machel Trust in 2010 where she focuses on advocating for women’s economic and financial empowerment, food security and nutrition, education for all, as well as good governance.

Among numerous awards, Machel has received the United Nations’ Nansen Refugee Award in recognition of her long-standing humanitarian work. In 1997, she was made an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2018, she was awarded the World Health Organization’s highest honour, the WHO Gold Medal, for her enormous contributions to the health and wellbeing of women, children and adolescents.

Graça Machel has dedicated her life to improving the fate of women and children, inspiring hope, and building a more just and equitable world for us all.

Trustee

Rachel Nyaradzo Adams

Rachel is the founder of Narachi Leadership, a boutique consultancy aimed at equipping leaders with unique tools for transformational leadership. She merges research and practice from neuroscience, psychology, biomimicry and ontology to give clients a holistic opportunity for theirs and their followers continued development. In this work she offers her expertise as a facilitator of leadership training, ontological coach, advisory partner and speaker. She works with corporates, entrepreneurs, teams andindividuals.

Rachel has received numerous awards for leadership and academic excellence including: the Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellowship; the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship; the Mellon Mays Leadership and Service Award; the Mellon Mays Scholarship and the Felix Scholarship. She read for her Masters in African Studies at the University of Oxford (St. Anthony’s College) and for her undergraduate and Honours degrees in Anthropology, Media and Writing at the University of Cape Town. She has delivered keynote addresses on various prestigious platforms including the UN, McKinsey, Yale, Obama Leaders, TEDx, EVE Africa, The Boardroom Africa and SciencesPo LeAD Campus amongst others. Her corporate clients include Discovery, ABSA, Dalberg, L’Oreal, Danone, Cellulant and Nedbank (amongst others) where she has worked largely with senior leadership but also with leaders of younger tenure.

Rachel enjoys traveling, learning from diverse spiritual practices, reading and writing. She is writing her first book.

Trustee

Dr Jumoke Oduwole

Dr Jumoke Oduwole is a lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence & International Law, Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, Nigeria. Her research interests include International Economic Law and Development, Public International Law and Human Rights, particularly the Right to Development and she has published widely in these areas. She is a second term elected member of the University of Lagos Senate where she sits on the Senate Committee in charge of Student Scholarships, Bursaries and Loans.

Professor Oduwole was appointed as the 2013-2015 holder of the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity 2013–2015, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, a visiting professorship in honour of the late Prince Claus of The Netherlands by the Curatorium chaired by H.M. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands.

Jumoke is a Vice President of the Africa Association of International Law (AAIL), representing West Africa and serves on the Executive Committee of the African International Economic Law Network. She was a 2013 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow of the prestigious African Leadership Institute.

Dr Oduwole has an LL.B from University of Lagos and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1999. She obtained an LL.M. degree from Cambridge University, England in 2000, where she was a DFID-Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholar. After a career in investment banking, Jumoke pursued a second masters degree in International Legal Studies as well as a doctorate degree in International Trade and Development from Stanford Law School, where she was a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN) from 2007/2008. Oduwole was a visiting scholar at University of Houston Law Center, Houston, Texas USA from 2008 to 2010.

Jumoke is passionate about development issues in Africa. She has mentored Nigerian youth in various capacities for over 15 years and is an avid photographer.

Board

Dr Donald Kaberuka

Dr. Donald Kaberuka is currently serving his second five-year term as President of the African Development Bank Group (AfDB). He was first elected in 2005, becoming the seventh president of the Bank Group since its establishment in 1963. He was re-elected in May 2010 at the AfDB’s headquarters in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, for a second five-year term. He took the oath for his second term in September of that year in Tunis, the Bank’s current temporary relocation city.

Before joining the African Development Bank, Dr Kaberuka, 60, had a distinguished career in banking, international trade and development and government service. A national of Rwanda, he was the country’s Minister of Finance and Economic Planning between 1997 and 2005. During this period, he oversaw Rwanda’s successful economic reconstruction after the end of the civil war there. He initiated and implemented major economic reforms and introduced new systems of structural, monetary and fiscal governance, laying special emphasis on the independence of Rwanda’s central bank.

These reforms led to the widely-recognized revival of Rwanda’s economy, and to the sustained economic growth that enabled Rwanda to obtain debt cancellation under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative in April 2005. During his service at the AfDB, Dr Kaberuka has presided over a major redirection in its strategy for development and poverty reduction in Africa. To that end, the AfDB has placed increased emphasis on the private sector, and on the importance of major infrastructure developments in areas such as road, railways, power plants and communications, especially in their role in promoting regional integration in Africa. During Dr Kaberuka’s period of office, the AfDB has become Africa’s premier financial institution. In 2009, in response to the global financial crisis, the African Development Bank Group made record approvals of loans and grants totaling more than USD 12.6 billion. Dr Kaberuka was educated at universities in Tanzania and Scotland. He holds a PhD in Economics from Glasgow University.

Board

Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala served as Managing Director of The World Bank Group since December 1, 2007 until August 2011. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, a Nigerian national, founded NOI-Gallup polls, an indigenous Nigerian opinion research organization, and co-founded the Makeda Fund – a fund to invest in African women entrepreneurs. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the Brookings Institution. She served as Finance Minister and subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nigeria from 2003-2006. As Finance Minister, She led Nigeria”s Economic Team responsible for implementing the Obasanjo administration’s far reaching economic and social reform agenda. The reforms made particular progress in restoring macroeconomic stability, tripling growth, initiating a strong fight against corruption, and increasing transparency.

Before taking up her Ministerial appointment, she served in a number of important positions at the World Bank including Vice President and Corporate Secretary, Director of Operations in the Middle East and North Africa region, and Country Director for the South East Asia and Mongolia Country unit. She joined the World Bank in 1982. She serves as a Director of World Resource Institute. She is a recipient of numerous awards and honors including Time Magazine European Hero 2004, Euromoney Magazine Global Finance Minister of the year 2005, Financial Times/The Banker African Finance Minister of the year 2005, This Day Nigeria Minister of the Year 2004, 2005, Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Colby College 2007, and Brown University 2006, Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Northern Caribbean University, Jamaica.

She is a member or chair of numerous boards and advisory groups in the public, private and non-governmental sectors including DATA, the World Resources Institute, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Nelson Mandela Institution and the African Institutes of Science and Technology, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Governance Prize Committee, Friends of the Global Fund Africa. She is also an adviser to the World Bank on the Stolen Assets Recovery (STAR) initiative, and served as a member of the Malan Committee on Bank-Fund collaboration. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in Economics from Harvard University, and holds a PhD in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Board

Mr Francis Daniels

Mr. Daniels has over 15 years’ experience investing in Africa. He is a director of Africa Opportunity Partners, the investment manager of Africa Opportunity Fund Limited, an investment company listed on the Specialist Fund Segment of the London Stock Exchange.

He is a member of the boards of directors of Masawara PLC, a company admitted to trading on the AIM Market with a portfolio of private investments in Zimbabwe; and Triton Resources, Inc., a private Canadian company dedicated to harvesting of trees submerged by the lakes created by hydroelectric dams, such as the Volta Lake in Ghana. He serves also as a member of the supervisory board of the Meridiam Africa Infrastructure Fund. Mr. Daniels is an attorney admitted to practice in the State of New York. He holds a LL.B degree from the University of Ghana, a LL.M degree from the University of Toronto, and a LL.M degree and a LL.M (Corporations) degree from New York University Law School. He is currently based in Johannesburg.

Board

Dr Adebayo Olukoshi

Nigerian national, Adebayo Olukoshi is the director of the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP). Prior to that position, Olukoshi held the posts Research Professor and Director of Research and Studies at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. He was also a Senior Research Fellow/Research Programme Coordinator of the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI) in Uppsala and Senior Programme Staff at the South Centre in Geneva. Until March 2009, he was Executive Secretary of the Council for Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). He holds a PHD in Politics from the University of Leeds.

Board

Mr Trevor Manuel

Trevor Manuel was the South African Minister of Finance for 13 years. Before being appointed as Minister of Finance, he served as Minister of Trade and Industry. From 2009 – 2014 he served in the Ministry of the Presidency where he led the National Planning Commission.

He has been awarded the “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum as well as Africa’s Finance Minister of the Year. He has held positions of leadership in a number of international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, Development Bank of Southern Africa, as well as the African Development Bank.

In 2014, Manuel left the public sector when he joined the Rothschild Group as their Worldwide Senior Advisor as well as Deputy Chairman of Rothschild South Africa. He is also currently the chancellor of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in the Western Cape.

Board

Mr Noureddine Ayed

A qualified Electro-Engineer, Mr Ayed is a Tunisian National who attained his academic qualifications in Liege, Belgium. With over three decades of experience in various industrial sectors, he has led multi-million dollar trade missions and developed successful partnerships with engineers and local government authorities in several countries. His track record includes international industrial technical assistance provided in countries including Tunisia, Egypt, Cameroon, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Qatar, Phillipines and the USA, amongst others.

Mr Ayed was elected Business Man of the Year 2008 and Honorary President by the Tunisian Businessmen World Association. He was also honoured by the Society Centre for Exporters in Milan, Italy and received awards from the Governments of Thailand and The Phillipines. Mr Ayed is Honorary Consul of Malaysia to Tunisia from 2004 till present day.

Board

Zeinab Badawi

Zeinab Badawi was born in  the Sudan – her family moved to London when she was two years old. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics  at Oxford University and for an MA in history  (awarded with a distinction) at SOAS, London University.  Zeinab has worked extensively in the British media for four decades and is now best known for her work in the BBC’s international division  at  BBC World News TV and BBC World Service Radio on programmes such as ‘Hard Talk’, and ‘Global Questions’ as well as a major 20-part tv series on the history of Africa which she produced and presented through her own production company for BBC World News.    

Zeinab is the current Chair of the Royal African Society  (Patron: HRH the Duke of Cambridge), a member of the International Advisory Board of Afrobarometer , a trustee of Historic Royal Palaces, BBC Media Action (the charitable arm of the BBC),  the Royal Opera House,  and Hampstead Theatre in London. She is also a member of the Rhodes Commission  Zeinab has  previously served on the board of the British Council, the National Portrait Gallery,  the Institute of Historical Research, the Overseas Development Institute and she has been Chair of Article 19.  

Zeinab has received many awards including honorary doctorates from  SOAS and the University of the Arts London, the President’s Medal of the British Academy for her services to broadcasting and education and the United Nations Association-UK Sir Brian Urquhart award for distinguished service to the UN.   Zeinab has four children. 

Patron

Hon Pedro Pires

Pedro Pires, Capeverdean freedom fighter, was born in 1934. Head of the delegation that negotiated the independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde with the Portuguese Government. Prime Minister of the Republic of Cape Verde for 15 years (1975-1991). Member of Parliament (1975-2001). Leader of the largest Capeverdean opposition party from 1991 to 1993, resuming leadership in 1997 until mid-2000. Elected President of the Republic of Cape Verde in 2001.

Reelected in 2006. Honoris Causa Degree by the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil; Honoris Causa Degree in Public Administration by the Institute of Social and Political Sciences of the Technical University of Lisbon. Mo Ibrahim laureate. President of Pedro Pires Institute for Leadership and Amilcar Cabral Foundation. Member of: the Africa Forum; West African Commission on Drugs. Jury of: Gulbenkian Prize; UNESCO Prize Jose Marti. UNCCD Ambassador of Drylands. Honorary Board Advisor of the Africa Foundation for Governance and Leadership.

Patron

Hon Festus Mogae

His Excellency Festus Mogae obtained a B.A. in Economics from the University of Oxford in June 1968 and after one year as a Junior Economist in the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning of Botswana, he obtained an M.A. in Development Economics from the University of Sussex in 1970. Thereafter he re-joined the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning team. He rose through the ranks until he became Permanent Secretary in the same Ministry.

He was then elected Alternate Executive Director and the full Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund, October 1976 to October 1980. On his return home he was appointed Governor of the Bank of Botswana (i.e. the Central Bank). In 1982 I was appointed Secretary to the Cabinet, Head of the Civil Service and Supervisor of Elections. On his retirement from the Public Service in 1989, he was elected Member of Parliament and appointed Minister of Finance and Development Planning. In 1992, he was appointed Vice-President but remained Minister of Finance and Development Planning. He was re-elected in 1994 as Vice President and became President in 1998 when his predecessor retired. He was elected President in 1999 and 2004 and retired from the Presidency in 2008.

During his Civil Service career, he served in many economic and development parastatals such as Botswana Development Corporation, National Development Bank, De Beers Botswana, Water Utilities Corporation, Botswana Power Corporation, Botswana Meat Commission and several mining companies as a Government Director. On retiring from the Presidency after ten years, he was awarded the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Excellence in African Leadership. He has also been honoured by five (5) African countries and received eight (8) Honorary Degrees from African, American, British and Australian Universities.

Patron

Hon Olusegun Obasanjo

His Excellency Olusegun Obasanjo served as President of Nigeria from May 1999 to May 2007. In 2008 he was appointed by the United Nations as a special envoy for Africa and has since overseen democratic elections on behalf of the African Union and Ecowas in countries across the continent. He established the African Leadership Forum, which organises workshops advocating African solutions to African problems through better leadership, state capacity building and the encouragement of private enterprise.

Outside of Nigeria he has been central in the regeneration and repositioning of the African Union. Together with former South African president Thabo Mbeki, he lead the creation of the African Peer Review Mechanism designed to engender and promote the ideals of democracy and good governance and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. In 2008 he was appointed special Envoy on the Great Lakes region by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and continues to be an integral actor in mediation efforts in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Obasanjo has also served as the African Union’s Special Envoy for Togo’s 2010 Presidential elections, as well as South Africa’s presidential polls in 2009.

He is presently an advisor to New World Capital; an investment advisory firm providing interested parties with market access, investment advisory and co-investment opportunities across the continent. President Obasanjo is also Founder of the Olusegun Obasanjo Foundation, a UK based charity that has a mission of advancing Human Security for All. The Foundation has wide ranging initiatives of Feeding Africa, Youth Empowerment, Education for Girls and a health initiative focused on non-communicable and water borne diseases.