Contributors

Alan Angell was principal organiser of Academics for Chile in the UK, 1973 to 1980, co-operating closely with Alan Phillips and WUS UK. He is now an emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford and a former director of the University Latin American Centre, publishing widely on Latin American politics, especially Chile. He has been honoured by the Chilean government on three occasions.

Alan Phillips was WUS (UK) General Secretary from 1973 to 1981. He moved on to help establish the British Refugee Council in 1982. In 1989 he was appointed Director of the Minority Rights Group International, leaving it in 2000 to become the UK expert on national minorities at the Council of Europe and its President until 2010. In recent years he has helped save WUS UK archives and supported research on its historic work. He has been honoured by the Chilean and UK governments, as well as by the University of Warwick.

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick and an internationally recognised scholar of Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies. She is Principal Investigator on an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to compile an oral history of Chilean Exiles in the UK. She works closely with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, and the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, which holds significant WUS UK archival resources.

Dr. Bettina Schmidt is a cultural anthropologist, project manager and lecturer for international programmes on development issues, human resource development and diversity management. She trained as a nurse, studied cultural anthropology and African Studies at the University of Mainz and Zimbabwe, holds a PhD from the University of Nijmegen, Netherlands, and holds a diploma in business management (Johannesburg). Her book, Creating order: culture as politics in 19th and 20th century South Africa was published 1996 by the University of Nijmegen. From 1991 to 1997 she was visiting research fellow at the University of Zimbabwe and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, was lecturer and researcher at the University of Mainz as well as consultant and project coordinator in adult education. Since 2012 she is a board-member of WUS Germany and volunteers in various of its activities. She is retired and works as external expert for the Africa section of the ethnological Lindenmuseum in Stuttgart focussing on colonialism and 357 List of Authors – A to Z – 100 years World University Service International restitution, and volunteers with WUS Germany. She published widely on the colonial and post-colonial period in Southern Africa.

Bridget's original work with WUS UK in 1985 was to undertake a feasibility study for the possibilities for Ugandan refugee communities in southern Sudan. Her focus was on educational opportunities for women. She subsequently worked briefly on the Horn of Africa scholarship programme. In 1989 she went to Gedaref in northern Sudan to co-ordinate an educational programme for refugee women. Her post-WUS work included time with the World Council of Churches Refugee Service in Geneva, Oxfam GB and Responding to Conflict. She is a co-author, with Simon Fisher and Vesna Matovic of Working with Conflict 2 published by Zed in 2020.

Dr. Caleb Fundanga has, since July 2014, been the executive director of the Macro Economic and Financial Management Institute (MEFMI) for Eastern and Southern Africa. MEFMI is a regional capacity building institution in the areas of Macro Economic and Financial Management based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Its main clients are central banks and ministries of finance and planning. He was governor of the Bank of Zambia from 2002 to 2011. After having served as senior advisor to the president of the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire from 1998, he further served as an executive director at the African Development Bank, before being appointed as senior advisor. He had served in senior positions in government. He served for six years at Cabinet Office before finally winding up in the Office of the President as permanent secretary in charge of the National Commission for Development Planning. Since July 2014, he has been the executive director of the Macro Economic and Financial Management Institute (MEFMI) for Eastern and Southern Africa. He has served as president of World University Service International. He began his economics career as an academic at the University of Zambia, soon after completing his PhD at Konstanz University in 1985.

Dr. Charles Mpande’s contact with WUS has been through WUS Canada’s Malawi program, first meeting Canadian volunteer teachers when he was a school principal in Malawi, where he was born. He studied in Malawi, the UK and Australia. While in Malawi, he taught in high schools and rose to Principal class during which time he interacted with Canadian volunteer teachers from Canada to Malawi. He went on to be a teacher trainer before he joined Chancellor College, University of Malawi, then he left for Australia where he is now a Senior Lecturer in Community Studies at Victoria University, his alma mater. Further, he is a member of the Pan-African Australasian Diaspora Network (PAADN) which has been actively engaged in African Union together with the United Nations’ matters pertaining to the International Decade of People of African Descent, and African diaspora engagement with Africa. As a Council member of PAADN, he is working with the African Union towards greater Australia and Africa partnerships among the African diaspora.

Chris Eaton is Executive Director of World University Service of Canada, WUSC.

Originally from South Africa, Clive Nettleton was the vice president of the National Union of South African Students in 1969. In 1972 he founded the Open School with support from WUS, which also supported his next programme People’s College, an educational supplement written by SACHED for Weekend, a paper with three million black readers. In 1978, the paper was banned and Clive was also banned. In March 1979 Clive left for Britain as a refugee and became Africa Secretary at the WUS International Secretariat in July of that year. After leaving Geneva in 1982 Clive worked as Head of Information for the British Refugee Council. He was Director of Health Unlimited which supported long term programmes in areas affected by conflict for 15 years from 1990 and then spent a year as an Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Tropical Medicine contributing to papers for “The Lancet” and compiling a report on the Social Determinants of Health of Indigenous People for WHO. Finally, he was the Director for Book Aid International until retiring in 2013. In both South Africa and the UK, he has served on the boards of a range of NGOs and in the UK was a school governor for nine years.