Ramesh S Arunachalam is a financial services sector, rural finance, MIS, MSME and development specialist with some 21 years of direct implementation and field experience. The primary focus of his work has always been to provide pragmatic and innovative solutions that foster the delivery of a wide range of competitive, gender-responsive and sustainable market-based financial and business development services to low income clients and women. He has worked in South Asia, Africa, Europe and North America (on some 200 assignments) with a large number of stakeholders including governments, bi- and multi-lateral donors, central banks and micro-finance institutions.
Debbie Budlender is a specialist researcher with the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working in the area of social policy research. She has been on a long-term, part-time secondment to the Centre for Actuarial Research at the University of Cape Town since 2002. She acted as the overall coordinator of South Africa's Women's Budget Initiative from the time it started in 1995 and has written extensively on gender-responsive budgets (GRBs), including several publications for the Commonwealth Secretariat. She has served as consultant to NGOs governments, parliamentarians and donors in countries across the Commonwealth and beyond. She is one of the five members of South Africa's Employment Conditions Commission, which advises the Government on minimum wages and conditions of employment for vulnerable workers, and a member of the Council of the University of Cape Town.
Marilyn Carr is a development economist with over 30 years working experience in Africa and Asia. She has a DPhil from the University of Sussex and an Msc (Econ) from the London School of Economics. She has been Director, Global Markets Programme, WIEGO; Senior Economic Adviser, UNIFEM, New York; Senior Economist, Intermediate Technology Development Group, UK; and Regional Adviser on Village Technology at the Women's Centre of the Economic Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa. She specialises in gender and trade; gender, science and technology; and women in informal economy enterprises. She has written and edited several books on these subjects, including most recently the Commonwealth Secretariat publications 'Chains of Fortune: Linking Women Producers and Workers with Global Markets' (editor) and 'Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction' (co-author).
Robert Carr is Deputy Director of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC), University of West Indies, Jamaica. He specialises in HIV and AIDS research and lectures, and is actively engaged in community training and public advocacy. He works extensively in the Caribbean region, advises regional and national organisations and has also published widely. He is part of the technical advisory group for the UNIFEM-led multi-agency initiative for gender mainstreaming HIV and AIDS interventions in the Caribbean.
Stephanie Barrientos is a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She has researched and published on gender and development in Africa and Latin America, globalisation and informal work, corporate accountability, fair trade, ethical trade and international labour standards. She co-ordinated a research project on Gender and Ethical Trade in African Horticulture and is now engaged in a research programme on the mainstreaming of fair trade. She has worked on projects relating to impact assessment and poverty monitoring and evaluation for the UN Industrial Development Organisation in India and the IFC South Asia Enterprise Development Facility in Bangladesh, and co-ordinated the UK Ethical Trading Initiative Impact Assessment (2003-2005). She has developed methodologies on 'Value Chain to Impact Mapping' and participatory social auditing, and is making a video on 'Participatory Social Auditing: A Gender-sensitive Approach'. She has advised and provided training for companies, NGOs and international organisations on various issues.
Khabele Matlosa is the Research Director of (EISA), in Johannesburg, South Africa and the regional Coordinator of the EISA project on 'Consolidating Democratic Governance in SADC'. He is a governance specialist and has researched and written widely on various governance and development themes including electoral system reform, political parties, regional security, conflict management, democracy and development, election observation/monitoring, regional integration and migration. Dr Matlosa is a member of the Board of Governors for the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) based at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He was also one of the experts who produced the Principles for Election Management, Monitoring and Observation in the SADC Region. He has observed elections in various SADC countries including the recent one in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Auxilia Bupe Ponga has a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, and is the Gender Adviser responsible for the public sector and governance in the Social Transformation Programme Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat. She was previously Permanent Secretary for Gender in the Development Division of the Cabinet Office, Government of Zambia, where she was the chief adviser on gender and led delegations to the United Nations and other international meetings. She has worked as a consultant with UN agencies, the World Bank and other bilateral agencies in Zambia and has wide experience with working with civil society organisations in southern Africa.
Sarojini Ganju Thakur is Head of the Gender Section of the Commonwealth Secretariat and Adviser, Poverty Eradication and Economic Empowerment. She is on secondment from the Indian Administrative Service (Himachal Cadre), which she joined in 1977. Her latest postings in the Government of India were as Joint Secretary, Department of Women and Child Development and Deputy Director, LBS National Academy of Administration, where she worked primarily on mainstreaming gender training for civil servants.
Sherrill Whittington has worked on gender issues and programmes for women for over 15 years, mostly through the UN and the Commonwealth of Learning. As a member of the UNICEF gender team, she was responsible for the development of a guide for institutional gender equality mainstreaming, and developed training materials to address the rights of women and children in emergencies and conflict. As senior adviser for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, she designed and implemented a global programme to incorporate youth issues into preparations for the conference. At field level, she was Head of the Gender Affairs Office in UNTAET, and established Timor-Leste's national machinery for women. More recently, she has worked on UNICEF programmes in post-conflict West Africa, worked as team leader for an AusAID study on the barriers to women in post-conflict government in the Solomon Islands and developed a brief for the Commonwealth Secretariat on women's parliamentary representation. She is a Visiting Professor in Gender and Peace-building at the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica. She has an MA in International Relations and an MLitt in Asian History.
Mariama Williams is an international economics consultant and an Adjunct Associate at the Centre of Concern, Washington DC, USA. She is also the Research Adviser for the International Gender and Trade Network. She is a member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and has worked with Women in Development Europe (WIDE). She has written extensively on gender and trade including a pioneering work on Mainstreaming Gender in the Multilateral Trading System for the Commonwealth Secretariat. She is very closely associated with the current work of the Secretariat on gender and trade.
