COURSE LECTURERS

Nama Budhathoki

Kathmandu Living Labs

Founder and Executive Director at Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL)—a non-for-profit civic tech company in Nepal. KLL pioneers Open Mapping and Open Data movement in Nepal and beyond. KLL’s work played vital role in Nepal’s earthquake response and relief operations. This work has received extensive coverage in media e.g. The New York Times, theguardian, BBC, ABC, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Setopati, Nepali Times, MyRepublica. Dr. Budhathoki earned his doctorate from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, he worked at McGill University, Canada as a postdoctoral research fellow, at Niti Foundation as the Director of programs and The World Bank as the Lead of Open Data for Resilience Initiative .

Paola Fava

Gnucoop

Paola Fava is Co-founder and Business Developer at Gnucoop Soc. Coop since 2012. She has over 6 years of experience as innovation officer and project manager for international NGOs in several countries, primarily: Malawi, Madagascar and Guatemala, where she focused on the development and management of ICT4D projects, particularly in the health sector. Her academic studies included both technical and social/economic disciplines. In 2005, she graduated at the Politecnico di Milano in Biomedical Engineering and in 2010 she obtained a Masters Degree in International Cooperation and Development at the University of Pavia.

Dr. Dan McQuillan

Goldsmiths, University of London

After his Ph.D in Experimental Particle Physics, Dr. McQuillan worked with people with learning disabilities and as a mental health advocate, and founded Multikulti, a community-led multilingual website for asylum seekers & refugees. He attended the G8 protest in Genoa in 2001 and was one of 93 people who were beaten, disappeared & tortured by Italian police. (documentary | movie). As Amnesty’s Director of E-communications, he led their delegation to the first UN Internet Governance Forum. He co-founded Social Innovation Camp which brought together ideas, people and digital tools to prototype solutions to social problems, and ran camps in different countries including Georgia, Armenia & Kyrgyzstan. He is active in citizen science and co-founded Science for Change Kosovo. Currently he is a Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent publications include Algorithmic States of Exception.

Josh Harvey

UNICEF Innovation Lab Kosovo

Josh Harvey is a social innovation practitioner. Most recently, he led the United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Innovations Lab Kosovo, a unit of UNICEF Kosovo (UNSC 1244) Programme and part of a collective of peer labs throughout UNICEF and across the globe looking (with humility) at how to reimagine the work of UNICEF and partners. In his role with the Lab, he oversees development of products that connect rights holders to knowledge and opportunity and that enable large scale, distributed, real-time data collection and analysis. Josh is also the architect of the Lab’s UPSHIFT programme for empowering adolescents and youth from vulnerable groups to build and lead innovative solutions to challenges faced in their communities. Prior to joining the Lab, Josh built out the technology sector partnerships practice at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF; while with the U.S. Fund’s Strategic Partnerships and UNICEF Ventures team, he was a member of the two person team that created and grew USF’s Sports Partnerships unit and managed partners from the pharmaceutical and logistics sectors. Josh holds a Master’s degree in International Development and Education from Columbia University Graduate School of Education and is a former Teach for America corps member (Newark ‘06). He is co-author of LabCraft: How Social Labs Cultivate Change through Innovation and Collaboration.

Gianluca Iazzolino

UNCDF

Gianluca holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Socio-legal Studies, University of Oxford, where he works on a EU funded project on media, conflict and democratisation, and a consultant for the Mobile Money for the Poor (MM4P) program at UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), where he looks at the impact of digital financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Development Studies, University of Bath, and a fellow of the Institute of Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, University of California, Irvine. He has worked as a consultant on cash-transfer programs and financial inclusion for FAO Somalia, Financial Sector Deepening Kenya and the Rift Valley Institute, Nairobi. As a freelance journalist, he has covered development issues and international affairs in Central andSouth America, the Middle East, Russia and India and he has published, among the others, on the Guardian, El Pais and Irin News.

Alfred Assey Mukasa

UNICEF Uganda

Alfred Assey Mukasa is a senior information systems architect and engineer with a focus on technology for development projects, actively seeking roles in projects that use modern innovative technology to improve the lives of the most marginalized and/or the least developed communities around the world. Alfred has held both lead roles and technical specialist roles for over 8 years on various technology for development teams with experience at both national and regional level, through-out Africa and for both big and small development organizations including the UN, EU and COMESA. He lead the teams who build “The Light Project” using innovative bicycle technology to convert human cycling energy to power small lamps used by off the grid households in remote Burundi. While working at UNICEF Uganda, Alfre has managed and developed the award-winning “U-Report” project, as well as “The Education Monitoring and Tracking System” used for literacy indicators, curriculum progress, utilization of capitation grants, sanitation in schools, teacher and pupil absenteeism among other indicators for primary schools at national level. Currently Alfred works for UNICEF Uganda as Lead Software Engineer – Community Health Management Systems.

Georges L. J. Labrèche

Open Data Kosovo

A problem solver, entrepreneur, and the founder of the Balkan’s leading civic-tech organization: Open Data Kosovo (ODK). He holds a Bachelor degree in Engineering and a Master degree in International Relations so he constantly busies himself with ideas that merge technology, good governance, and social impact.

Not stopping short at delivering civic-tech solutions for partner organizations around the world, Georges’ team at ODK mentors Kosovo’s tech savvy youth into providing digital solutions to local governance challenges.

Simone Sala

FAO

Consultant in the communication and development sector of the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO). From 2004 on, he focuses on the research and practice of applying ICT to sustainable development. He worked with universities (Columbia University, MIT IDI, UniMi, USI-Lugano), NGOs, FAO and Italian Development Cooperation in Africa, Asia, Caribbeans and Middle East. Currently, his team works on techniques aimed at facilitating the collaboration between smallholders and other actors in rural areas.

Ron Salaj

Ong 2.0

Ron Salaj is a human rights and environmental activist, working at intersection of digital social innovation, human rights and campaigning. Ron has co-founded Science for Change Kosovo Movement – a radical youth-led environmental movement, investigating air pollution in Kosovo and mobilizing people to take actions. Between 2010-2016 he worked as digital lead at the UNICEF’s Innovations Lab Kosovo, a unit of UNICEF Kosovo, where they look across sectors and fields to identify methods, technologies, and tools that promise to advance our service to children and youth. He has extensive experience on human rights education and campaigning, where he worked with various human rights organizations and collective groups on defending and promoting human rights, including Council of Europe, UNDP, etc. With ONG 2.0, Ron coordinates the long-term online course “ICT Innovations for Development”. Recently he co-authored the Manual on Developing Counter- and Alternative Narratives to Combat Hate Speech and Promote Human Rights, which will be published by Council of Europe.

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Satu Valtere

Human Rights activist

Satu Valtere is a human rights activist, focusing on anti-racism and against hate speech. She worked for Save the Children Office in Helsinki as advisor on developing anti-racism programmes and campaigns. She coordinated the online campaign of the Council of Europe – No Hate Speech Movement – in Finland as well as engaged in other work with the Council of Europe mainly in the field of human rights education, running trainings, seminars and workshops for human rights activists across Europe. Currently, she co-founded “Satu Valtere Consulting and Training” firm as well as hold advisor position at Miltton, a PR and communications agency. She holds a Master of Arts on HUman Rights from University of London

Awa Caba

Co-founder and CEO of Sooretul

Awa holds a diploma in computer science at the Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique – Dakar; Awa Caba is an entrepreneur and IT consultant applied to agro-business. She completed her studies with a degree in Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa – United States.

Awa is co-founder and CEO of Sooretul; The first digital platform for the promotion of processed agricultural products in Senegal. As a consultant of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in 2013, she facilitated the implementation of a strategy for the marketing and communication of local products processed by beneficiaries of the Agricultural Value Chain Support Project and the Support to Agricultural Development and Rural Entrepreneurship (PADAER / PAFA). She afterwards was National Coordinator of Innovation Factory, a program of the German Cooperation (GIZ) to setting up an AgriTech Hub in Thiès in order to stimulate the creation of innovative solutions for young people in agriculture and ICTs in Senegal. Through these experiences in technology and agriculture and her desire to popularize the importance of technology in development; Awa design a courses on e-commerce, web marketing and extension of agricultural technology for Agrobussiness Master of the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis (UGB).

She is also co-founder of the first Women Network in Technology in Senegal, Jjiguene Tech Hub, that aims to encourage and inspire more women to integrate the ecosystem of Technology and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

With these different projects and programs, Awa participates in the financial empowerment of youth and women and promotes the impulse of the digital economy around agro-business in Senegal, Africa.

Dr. Annie Feighery

Co-founder and CEO of mWater

Dr. Annie Feighery is a behavioral health scientist specializing in maternal and child health. She is the co-founder and CEO of mWater, a tech startup that leverages real-time, cloud-based management tools to catalyze the work of health professionals and governments around the world. mWater is a free platform used to map and monitor critical points in low-resource regions like water sources, sanitation facilities, and health clinics in 130 countries and manage them with mobile tools. Dr. Feighery is the mother of three children and lives in New York City.