Check out these cool women!  (PS: This page will continue to be updated…)

Carolyn Dunn, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Panelist, “My Africa, Your Africa“)

Rachel Gichinga (Panelist, “At the Source“) has been working in the area of creative arts for development for the last 5 years. She holds a BA in International Relations and works with musicians, photographers and bloggers in employing creative approaches to advocacy, civic engagement and development initiatives. Projects that she has worked on include a countrywide civic education tour where musical theatre was the primary entry point for discussion in over 52 communities; working with popular Kenyan musicians in community dialogue initiatives; and using the Internet and other new media to get young Kenyans actively and consciously engaged in their own political development.

She co-founded Kuweni Serious in October 2009, when, after a series of conversations about Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007/8  and the founding team’s fears about what might happen in the 2012 election, they decided to go out there and ask: How do Kenya’s youth feel about all the chaos around them? At Kuweni Serious, we think that the ordinary citizen is an important yet often ignored part in the complex machinery that is society and government. Our biggest ambition is to somehow elevate the opinion of the ordinary citizen back to its proper place. Governance should be a conversation, not a lecture.

Sarah McGregor, Bloomberg News / Foreign Correspondents Association of East Africa (Panelist, “Women’s Voices in a Man’s World“) Sarah McGregor is a Canadian who studied journalism and international development. She’s worked as a reporter and editor for publications in Canada, before traveling abroad for an internship at Reuters news agency in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2006. Following that, Sarah moved to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for two years, reporting for Bloomberg News, which focuses mainly on business and financial information. She moved to Bloomberg’s East Africa bureau in Nairobi two years ago where her beat is mainly big-picture economic stories, as well as government and politics. She’s the mother of an almost one-year-old boy, Otem.

Helen Nyambura-Mwaura, Reuters (Panelist, “My Africa, Your Africa“)

Rosemary Okello Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service / International Women’s Media Foundation / “Reject” (Panelist, “Women’s Voices in a Man’s World“) Rosemary Okello-Orlale is the executive director of African Woman and Child Feature Service (AWC), a media NGO focusing on the development of communication in Africa. The Media Diversity Centre, a project of AWC, publishes the “Reject” and “Kenyan Women” news supplements. She is also secretary to the Kenya Editors’ Guild and secretary of the African Editor’s Forum. She holds an M.A. in new media governance and democracy. She also holds a post-graduate diploma in research methodology and population studies from the Research Institute at the University of Nairobi and a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the London School of Journalism. She was awarded first prize as the best female reporter on ICT at the 2004 African Information Society Initiative media awards.

Karen Rothmyer (Panelist, “My Africa, Your Africa“) is the public editor of The Star. She is also a contributing editor to The Nation, a US political weekly, where she was managing editor for nine years. She was a school teacher in Kenya many years ago, after which she worked as a reporter and editor at several US publications including The Wall Street Journal and Newsday. In 2007 she returned to live in Kenya, initially as a visiting journalism instructor at the University of Nairobi. In late 2010 she was a fellow of the Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, during which she wrote a paper on the influence of NGOs on coverage of Africa. A short version of that paper appears in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review.

Lilla Schumicky (Panel Moderator) has most recently been working with the Observatory on Violence in Hargeisa, Somalia, as part of the United Nations Development Programme. The Observatory supports violence reduction in Somalia by providing data analysis on violence, policy recommendations, and training for activities to be implemented at the community level in Somaliland, Puntland, and South Central Somalia. The Observatory is meant to bring together the knowledge and experiences of all actors in order to create a central knowledge bank from which information on violence and manners of addressing it can be exchanged to improve the impact of community safety interventions.

Lilla studied Philosophy, Turcology and African studies at the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. She completed her MA in Philosophy and Diploma in African Studies in 2006. Later, she took up Anthropology and Philosophy at the University of Miskolc in Hungary, the University of Georgetown in the US, and the Universite de la Sorbonne in France. She has been a lecturer in Anthropology and Conflict Resolution at the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies at Gulu University in Uganda. In recent years, she has been leading several projects for national and international NGOs in northern Uganda, eastern Congo, and Kenya. She is co-founder of the northern Uganda based NGO: ReNU. She remains a consultant of it. Lilla carried out academic research in northern Uganda, The Gambia, and Sierra Leone on the topic of child soldiering, reintegration and female sex tourism. Lilla is also the author of Children of War, published in Eastern Europe, about child soldiering.

Jane Thuo (Panelist, “Women’s Voices in a Man’s World“) is the Executive Director of the Association of Media Women in Kenya (AMWIK), a Nairobi-based organization that brings together women communicators from the private and public sectors of Kenya to pool their professional skills in giving more visibilty to women’s concerns. AMWIK also uses networking to foster collaboration with other sectors of society around issues of Human Rights, Democracy, Governance, Gender Based Violence, and equal representation of women in leadership positions and development.

Angela Wachuka (Panelist, “At the Source“) is the Executive Director of Kwani Trust. Established in 2003, Kwani Trust is a Kenyan-based literary network dedicated to developing quality creative writing and committed to the growth of the creative industry through the publishing and distribution of contemporary African writing, offering training opportunities, producing literary events and establishing and maintaining global literary networks. Its vision is to create a society that uses its stories to see itself more coherently.

Angela joined Kwani Trust in February 2008.  Previous to this, she studied and worked in England for six years. As a freelancer for the BBC’s African News and Current Affairs Department, she worked as a Broadcasting Assistant on both the “Focus on Africa” and “Network Africa Radio” programmes, and also on the quarterly Focus on Africa magazine. Angela holds a BA in Anthropology & Law from the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) and has held various research-oriented posts at the London Borough of Lambeth, the Association of British Insurers and the Centre for African Policy & Peace Strategy (CAPPS) in London.

Rebecca Wanjiku (Panelist, “At the Source“) is a technology journalist and blogger based in Nairobi who also works with Ushahidi, the pioneering project to crowd-source crisis information. She has worked in print and online media in Kenya and abroad, covering issues in health, environment, human rights, legal and now specializing in technology. Currently a freelance journalist with IDG News Service, a technology Newswire, some of her stories are covered by Computerworld PCWorld and Infoworld among other publications -offline and online- owned by IDG.

As a blogger, she shares insights, rants, frustrations and opinions. In research, she has authored a chapter on Citizen Journalism in East Africa as part of a book published by Rhodes University on democracy in Africa, and she has been involved in telecoms policy research under the Association of Progressive Communications (APC). She has also extensively covered tech meetings such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), and is well versed with Africa Tech.