Okechukwu Ukaga

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Okechukwu Ukaga is the Executive Director of Northeast Minnesota Sustainable Development Partnership, University of Minnesota. He is also a Full Extension Professor of sustainable development with the University of Minnesota Extension Service. Before coming to Minnesota, Dr. Ukaga served as the founding Managing Director of the International Institute for Sustainable Development at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. In that capacity, he planned and managed many international development projects, working with organizations and people from countries in Africa, South America, Asia and the Middle East. He was born in Nigeria and received a Higher National Diploma in fisheries from Imo State College of Agriculture and a Post Graduate Diploma in agricultural economics from the University of Nigeria before traveling to the USA for further studies where he received an M.S. in education and an M.B.A. from Florida A&M University, and a Ph.D. in agricultural extension from Penn State University.

Okechukwu Ukaga has served and continues to serve on many important boards and international project teams. Examples include Executive Board of the Minnesota Evaluation Association, Minnesota Sea Grant College, Consortium for Sustainable Village Based Development, and Renewing the Countryside, Inc to name a few. He also served as a member of a Kettering Foundation funded national (USA) task force on the practice of public scholarship in land-grant institutions, a member of a European Union funded international task force on evaluation of sustainable development, and a consultant for the Florida A & M University —United States Agency for International Development Agribusiness Development Program (ADP) training in South Africa. His work has been applied and adapted in many parts of the world including various countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Examples include evaluation of Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships in Minnesota, USA; public service program of several Universities in Indonesia, HELPO Foundation’s rural development project in India, and development of indicators for Sustainable Urban Brownfield Regeneration Integrated Management (SUBR:IM) consortium case study sites located in Manchester and Barking in Essex, United Kingdom.

Professor Ukaga has written and/or coauthored over 50 publications including books, book chapters, special edition of a scholarly journal, journal articles, conference papers, and project reports. His book Renewing the Countryside (2001, co-edited with Jan Joannides, Sara Bergan, Mark Ritchie, and Beth Waterhouse) highlights the success stories of people across Minnesota’s diverse and beautiful landscapes who are conserving and enhancing the state’s natural and cultural resources while spurring local economic and community development. His book Evaluating Sustainable Development (2004, co-authored with Chris Maser) presents the principles and tools for participatory evaluation of sustainable development. His latest book Sustainable Development in Africa (2005, co-edited with Osita Afoaku) examines factors limiting sustainable development in Africa and offers reasoned suggestions on practical strategies for achieving development in Africa that is anchored on the values of sustainability, appropriateness and equity. His forthcoming book Sustainable Development: Principles, Frameworks and Cases (2007, co-edited with Chris Maser and Mike Reichenbach) summarizes selected key sustainable development models, including salient case examples that illustrate each model or framework.

Danna Harman

Morning Address Speaker/Panelist

Danna Harman was born in Boston, 37 years ago to an Israeli father and an American mother, and grew up between Jerusalem, Boston and New York. After completing her two years mandatory military service in Israel, Danna received a BA from Harvard University and later a masters in Islamic Studies from Cambridge University, England. Danna began her career as a journalist as an intern at the Associated Press office in Jerusalem, and went on to become an AP print and radio correspondent and later, the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s only English daily paper. In that capacity, she followed a succession of Israeli Prime Ministers through the optimistic times of the late 1990s, when the peace process seemed to be taking off.

Eventually tiring of the Israeli-Palestinian story – and a peace process which actually stubbornly refuses to take off-- Danna left Israel in 2000 and moved to Nairobi, Kenya where she freelanced until getting a staff job with the Christian Science Monitor. Working for CSM Danna then spent three years traveling the continent, trying to understand its rhyme and reason and falling in love with its pace and people. She also went out on assignments back to the Middle East, reporting from Egypt, Yemen and Iraq.

Following a year of domestic reporting in Washington, DC for the Monitor, Danna moved to Mexico in 2004, opening a joint Latin America office for CSM and USA Today and reporting up and down that continent. Last year, she decided to return to Israel and freelancing in order to try her hand at longer series and magazine pieces. Her last series, for CSM, took her back to Africa, as she followed President Bill Clinton on his travels there, and pondered the question of why so many celebrities of various stripes are increasingly enamored with Africa.

Gisele M. Yitamben

Panelist

Gisele M. Yitamben is a dynamic leader and a senior international expert consultant well known on questions of entrepreneurship development, information and communication technology (ICT) and gender. She is the founder and President of the Association for the Support of Women Entrepreneurs, best known by its French acronym ASAFE, a non-profit enterprise. She was also the Vice-President of the board of Digital Initiative (UNIFEM). An ardent defender of the rights of underprivileged persons, and notably women and youths, her actions have always been targeted towards ameliorating the welfare of those around her through searching for access to productive resources and technical services (alternative finance, training and high added value jobs, etc,) She initiated street football in Cameroon in 2004. Her team ranked number 6 out of 48 countries represented at the 2006 Homeless World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa.

Gisele actively contributed in the preparation of Africa for the World Women’s Summit in Beijing-China (1995) ; and presided over the Economic and Political Empowerment of Women panel, organized by the United Nations Population Funds (UNFPA). She continued to strive for the success of Beijing+5 in New York, USA. Gisele Yitamben is an elected member of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Handicraft of Cameroon, where she is presiding over the Vocational Training Commission. She is also the Vice-President of the Vocational Training Commission of the African consultative chambers.

Ada Ndeso-Atanga

Panelist

Ada Ndeso-Atanga is a professional specialist in sustainable development and natural resource management. She advises on contemporary environment problems, such as soil conservation, deforestation, community forestry, biodiversity, and tropical rainforest conservation.

She has acquired formal training on Land Tenure and management of Natural resources in Sub-Sahara Africa at the Land Tenure Center, university of Wisconsin, Madison. Part of her formal training was received in strategic management of non-governmental organizations at the School for International Training, Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. Her experience covers managing multiple donor supported livelihoods, natural resource management programs, and planning implementation monitoring and evaluation.

Her expertise includes developing and sustaining interpersonal relationships with non-governmental, private voluntary organization and government agencies concerned with environmental protection and sustainable development. Furthermore, she has coordinated and enhanced the capacity of private, voluntary organizations and NGOs to achieve sustained development. Her solid background in forestry stems from her degree of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. She is currently teaching a quarter at Principia College, Elsah, Illinois, USA.

Olajide Oloyede

Panelist

Olajide Oloyede studied sociology in London and Uppsala, Sweden where he obtained his PhD. He is currently Head of Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of the Western Cape. Previous to this, he taught in universities in Finland and Nigeria. He has taught and researched on development issues in Africa. His current areas of research are in epistemology, rural sociology and sociology of health. He is well published in academic journals; his piece titled Mental illness in culture, Culture in mental illness: an anthropological perspective from South Africa was a subject of debate in the international Amsterdam-based journal, Medische Anthropologie. He is a past vice president of the South African Sociological Association and still sits on the Council of the Association. He is the deputy editor of the South African Review of Sociology, the Association’s journal.

Gina Chowa

Panelist

Gina Chowa is Project Director for Assets Africa, a research demonstration project in Sub Saharan Africa, at Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis. Ms. Chowa is also a PhD Candidate at Brown School of Social Work. Prior to coming to Washington University she was Project Management Consultant for World Vision International Botswana, Project Director for Pudulong Development Trust in Botswana, before she founded her own not-for-profit organization, Chowa Development Consultant. Ms Chowa is a Zambian national.

Her recent work is in the rural district of Uganda where she initiated and implemented an asset building intervention research project. In this project she seeks to understand the impact of a savings intervention on future expectations of participants, how these expectations are translated into action to accumulate assets and the economic, social and psychological outcomes of owning assets. Her years of experience working internationally with economically disenfranchised communities, gives her strong standing to address the gaps in knowledge surrounding cultural institutions, gender issues, and regulatory systems as they relate to asset ownership.

Gina Chowa’s other research interest include International social and economic development, women and children’s asset development, cultural institutions and development, intervention and evaluative research, and community development.