In 1995 he was appointed as Chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission by then President Nelson Mandela, to investigate apartheid-era crimes. Today Archbishop Tutu is regarded as an elder world statesman with a major role to play in reconciliation and as a leading moral voice. He has become an icon of hope far beyond the Church and Southern Africa. Throughout his life, he has been known pre-eminently as a spiritual leader caring deeply about the needs of people around the world, teaching love and compassion to all.


Lanre Akinola
Editor, This Is Africa

Lanre Akinola is Editor of This Is Africa, a Financial Times Ltd publication, which focuses on the policy and the business environment across the continent, as well as Africa's strategic relationships with other world regions. He covers a broad range of topics relating to Africa across the fields of business, policy and development. A native of Lagos, Nigeria, he holds a degree in politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Shane’s unique and innovative market approach has been recognised widely. He has been the recipient of numerous local and international awards and is further an inducted member of The African Leadership Institute, a Desmond Tutu Fellow, a LINC Fellowship recipient, an invited member of the inaugural group of the African Leadership Network and a recent recipient of the Global Humanitarian Laureate.

Shane actively supports emerging market and social entrepreneurship development programmes with international and local business schools and faculty, including Harvard, MIT Sloan, Stanford, Duke and the University of Texas in the USA, INSEAD in Europe, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science, the University of Johannesburg and the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. 

Shane also serves on various NGO Boards, including The Desmond Tutu Tutudesk Campaign Centre NPC, where he serves as Chief Operating Officer, and Tutudesk UK.

Mary Metcalfe
Chair of the OSF’s General Education Advisory Board, Open Society Foundations

Mary Metcalfe has worked in education since 1974. She was elected as a member of the African National Congress in Gauteng in the first democratic elections in 1994 and was appointed as the Provincial Minister of Education (MEC) in Gauteng where she served from 1994 – 1999, and as MEC for Agriculture, Conservation, Environment and Land from 1999 - 2004.  

Ms Metcalfe served as Head of the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand from 2004 to 2009, before joining the Department of Higher Education and Training as Director General in 2009.  She  is currently at the Development Bank of Southern Africa as well as being a visiting Fellow on the Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, and a Visiting Adjunct Professor at Wits.


Hugh McLean
Hugh McLean is the director of the Open Society Foundations Education Support Program, and is based in the foundations’ London office. He started his career as a teacher in a remote resettlement village in one of South Africa’s apartheid homelands in the early 1980s where he established an education initiative with local youth. After this was closed by South African authorities he worked in adult literacy and trade union education in Johannesburg. After the unbanning of the ANC, he worked in corporate philanthropy, which was eager to influence South Africa’s transition to democracy and focused on a mix of community-level initiatives and high-level power broking. McLean set up the first professional association of Southern African grantmakers; he left South Africa in 1999 to work for OSF in Hungary, where the education programme was focused primarily on supporting the transition in former communist countries. OSF’s education programmes now focus on supporting social movements and professional networks to affirm education as a public good and promote the right to education globally.


Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane 
Junior Director, Barclays Bank (South Africa & Mozambique)
Advisory Board Member, The Desmond Tutu Tutudesk Campaign Centre

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, Jr established the Pick n Pay Supermarket Groupon in Mozambique and is currently advising Anadarko Petroleum Corporation on the Mozambique LNG Project, a Director in Barclays Africa Group, Barclays Bank Mozambique and is a regular panellist at Boston University’s African Presidential Centre’s Roundtable. He is also the Principle Advisor to The Tutudesk Campaign’s Founder and COO, Shane Immelman. Mr Mondlane has advised many multinational corporations over the years including firms such as ABN, Barclays, Lahmeyer international, Siemens Telecommunications, Siemens Oil & Gas, Sinohydro, Essar, Overvecht, and others. In the early 1990s, he performed advisory work for the Aerospace Industry and worked on projects, such as the 3.4 Gigawatt Mephanda Nkuwa and Cahora Bassa North Bank, Hydro Electro Dams in Mozambique, amongst others. He led a team with UBS that advised the Government of Portugal to prepare the groundwork for the successful sale of the Cahora Bassa Dam to the Government of Mozambique, Africa’s second largest hydro-electric dam. In the mid 1980s, he set up and operated an Africa focused trading company in New York City and founded the Mozambique Business Council in Washington DC. He then moved to Italy to advise Italian firms on the development of infrastructure projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. He currently resides in South Africa.


Michael “Gus” Schmedlen
Vice President, Worldwide Education, HP

Gus Schmedlen is the executive leader of education strategy, marketing and partnerships for HP’s Printing and Personal Systems Division, serving schools, colleges and universities in over 160 countries. Previously, Mr Schmedlen served as Director of Commercial Marketing and Director of Worldwide Education at Lenovo. Prior to Lenovo, he served nine years at IBM in New York, Boston, Washington and Hartford, most recently as Education Sector Executive for North and South America. Mr Schmedlen has served as a director and advisor to many education advocacy groups, including the World Economic Forum Global Education Initiative, the Education Research Initiative (ERI), the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the United Nations Private Sector/ Private Foundation Constituency. He spoke on the role of technology in education at the inaugural UN Global Partnership for Education meeting in Copenhagen in 2011 and currently works with the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-Ed) to improve access to and the quality of education in the developing world. His article “The Role of the For-Profit Firm in the Education Ecosystem” was published in April, 2013 in the textbook Principal 2.0: Technology and Education Leadership. This work was based on ideas he developed for his editorial, “Sharing Value through Society-Centric Design,” which appeared in the 2012 UN edition of This is Africa. Mr Schmedlen graduated with a BA in Classics and English Literature from Colgate University, and an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. In recognition of his contributions to global education and innovation in corporate social responsibility, he was selected as a 2013 Eisenhower Fellow.


Sam Singh
Chairman, The Desmond Tutu Tutudesk Campaign (UK)


Rebecca Sweetman 
CEO, The Desmond Tutu Tutudesk Campaign Centre (UK)   

Rebecca Sweetman is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Tutudesk Campaign's UK operations, responsible for developing commercial relationships, securing sponsorships and developing strategic partnerships to provide an increasingly international platform for the activities of the Campaign Centre in South Africa. She started her career at McKinsey where she worked in the London office and, for a time, in Johannesburg, with a particular emphasis on health and consumer projects. 

She is an adviser to ‘enke: Make Your Mark’, a Johannesburg-based youth development non-profit that inspires and supports young South Africans taking action on the most urgent social issues, and is currently an active member of Sandbox, an international program for entrepreneurs under 30 committed to making effective change. She has a degree in Economics and Management from Oxford University.