Thursday, April 15, 2010
Peace Building And Conflict: The Role For Social Entrepreneurs
Session Description
Ending conflict and building peace requires both political leadership at the top and energy and commitment from the bottom. Social entrepreneurs working in conflict zones and post-conflict societies often seek support for peace at the grass roots. What does it take to be effective in this setting? How do projects survive and can they be scaled up? How do you find partners and allies? This session focuses on locally-led solutions to conflict and the role that social entrepreneurs are playing in some of the most divided societies on earth.
When | Where
09:00 - 10:30
Thursday, April 15
Session leaders
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Gidon Bromberg, Co-founder and co-director of EcoPeace Middle East, an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental peacbuilding organization. Together with his Palestinian and Jordanian co-directors he was honored by TIME Magazine as Environmental Heroe of 2008 and was granted the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2009, in addition to numerous other awards over the years.
Mr. Bromberg is an attorney by profession and previously worked in public interest environmental law. He holds a Bachelor of Economics and a law degree from Monash University in Australia. As a fellow of the New Israel Fund, he completed a master's degree in international environmental law at the American University in Washington D.C. and has published over twenty academic and popular publications concerning Middle East environmental policy and water security issues.
Mr. Bromberg speaks regularly on water, peace and security issues in various forums. He has presented before the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament and the advisory meeting to the UN High Level Panel on Security. In 2007, Mr. Bromberg was invited to join the prestigious East West Institute's International Task Force for Preventive Diplomacy. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship at Yale University on global leadership and was in invited by Yale University in 2009 to serve as an Advisory Board Member for the World Fellows Program.
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Chief Executive Officer, The Zimbabwe Trust
Bella Matambanadzo is CEO of The Zimbabwe Trust, a non-profit supporting Zimbabwe’s economic recovery. She has worked in radio, print and television, covering news in 36 African countries for agencies such as the Southern African Economist, Inter Press Service (IPS), the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation’s (ZBC) Radio One and Reuters’ Africa Journal. Previously, she was Zimbabwe Country Programme Manager for the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, and Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of Radio Voice of the People (VOP).
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Veteran United Nations Envoy and Advisor, The Elders
In his distinguished career, Lakhdar Brahimi has served as Algeria’s Foreign Minister and as Ambassador to Egypt and the UK. He mediated the end of Lebanon’s civil war. At the United Nations, he led the Observer Mission to South Africa when Nelson Mandela was elected and served in Haiti and Afghanistan. He led the creation of the Brahimi Report, with ambitious recommendations to improve UN peacekeeping. He is a member of The Elders, a group of senior statesmen created by Mandela.
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A global advocate for freedom, justice and development for over two decades, Mabel van Oranje is the initiator and chair of ‘Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage’. She is also co-founder and the executive chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations. She is a member of the (advisory) boards of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, Crisis Action, Global Witness, the Malala Fund, the Open Society Foundations and The Elders.
In 1993, Mabel founded the European Action Council for Peace in the Balkans and was its CEO until 1997. In 1997, she joined the Open Society Foundations in Brussels as Executive Director, becoming OSF’s London-based International Advocacy Director in 2003. From 2008 until 2012, she was the first CEO of The Elders.
Mabel helped found the Dutch foundation War Child (1995), the global NGO coalition ‘Publish What You Pay’ (2002) and the Independent Commission on Turkey (2004). She has been actively engaged in the fight against HIV/AIDS and in global efforts that led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
Mabel holds masters degrees in Economics and Political Science (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam. In 2005, the World Economic Forum named her one of its Young Global Leaders. In 2014, she received a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and the John Diefenbaker Defender of Human Rights and Freedom Award for her work with Girls Not Brides.
You can follow her tweets @MabelvanOranje
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Scott is the founder of Building Markets, a social enterprise that helps create jobs and reduce poverty by connecting local entrepreneurs to global markets. Under his leadership, that organization pioneered new models for creating shared value, and helped broker over $1.2 billion in contracts in Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor Leste, Burma, and Liberia, creating 70,000 jobs in the process. Currently Scott is working on the launch of a private equity investment fund for frontier markets in Africa. Prior to this, Scott was a Canadian diplomat with extensive experience in Asia and worked for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in East Timor. In 2010, President Obama and Prime Minister Harper awarded the G20 SME Prize to Scott. The Globe & Mail designated him a "Leading Thinker" on aid in the 21st century, the World Economic Forum has honored him as a Young Global Leader, and he is a Senior Fellow with the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Ashoka Foundation.
