GDL Virtual Session, 12 October 2017
With Imran Simmins (representative of the EAC), Elizabeth Maloba (moderator), Vesna Teršelič (moderator), Alejandra Naftal (speaker) and Sebastian Schonfeld (translator and speaker).
Further Videos
Imran is a South African diplomat in the process of completing his MA in International Relations and World Order through the University of Leicester online, with a focus on the impact that Technology is having on International Relations. He is currently an official in South Africa's Foreign Ministry, covering issues related to South Africa's position on science and technology in a multilateral organisation such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS).
Prior to this, he served as First Secretary (Political) at the Embassy of South Africa in Berlin, Germany, from 2014 to 2017; as Desk Officer for the National Office for Coordination of Peace Missions, as well as on the USA Political Bilateral Desk. His first diplomatic posting were as First Secreatry (Political) at the South African Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe, from June 2007 to July 2011, where he dealt with a range of issues from serving on the secretariat of the South African Mediation Team to dealing with the land issues in Zimbabwe as it affected South Africa.
Throughout his teenage years he took up various leadership positions as a student activist in organisations that stood up against apartheid and any other forms of injustice. To this day, he holds and maintains these values.
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Read more about Imran in this blog article.
Elizabeth has twenty years’ experience in addressing complex challenges. She works in cross-sectoral, trans-professional, multi-stakeholder settings, providing support in problem solving and decision making processes and facilitating learning and the exchange of ideas and information. She has extensive experience in international cooperation, development cooperation, and private sector development.
Elizabeth is active in cross-cultural groups, from grassroots level to global platforms, assisting in the professional development of leaders and the formation of, teams, policies, strategies, plans, and business models that contribute to addressing development challenges. She brings skills in capacity building, knowledge management, facilitation, conflict resolution and management, as well as experience as an entrepreneur gained through a wide variety of assignments. She lives in Nairobi, works across the world, and speaks English, Swahili, German and French.
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Find out more about her engagement here and in this interview. Furthermore, Elizabeth reflected on inclusion here.
Vesna Teršelič is the founder and director of the Croatia-based organisation Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past. The central aim of her work is to establish factual truth about the war and to play a role in shifting the discussion from the level of dispute over facts towards a dialogue on interpretations, as well as to support survivors and advocate acknowledgment of the suffering of victims of war crimes. In doing so, she is continuing her earlier work as Director of the Centre for Peace Studies, Zagreb, and as founder and coordinator of the Anti-War Campaign in Croatia.
Since 1985, she has focused on organising for social change by advocating environmental protection, affirming women’s rights and promoting human rights. As one of the initiators of RECOM, a non-political regional coalition of civil society organisations and individuals working to establish a fact-finding commission into the Yugoslav wars, she has been campaigning for years to establish the facts about war crimes and human rights violations committed in former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001.
She was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1998 for her efforts in building peace and affirming the right to truth, justice and remembrance in post-Yugoslav countries, after having been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
