7th - 9th July 2025
Conference theme:
AI and diversity in a datafied world of work: Will the future of work be inclusive?
Past Conferences - EDI 2022 Cape Town
Invited Speakers
Mamokgethi Phakeng
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town
Mamokgethi Phakeng (formerly Setati) began her term of office as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town on 1 July 2018, where she had been serving as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Internationalisation since January 2017. Previous to this appointment she served as Vice Principal for Research and Innovation at the University of South Africa (Unisa) for five years, after serving three years as Executive Dean of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology at the same university. She holds a PhD in Mathematics Education from the University of the Witwatersrand and is a highly regarded B1 NRF-rated scientist with over 80 research papers and five edited volumes published. She has been invited to deliver over 40 keynote/plenary talks at international conferences, and as a visiting professor in universities around the world (in Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Senegal, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA). She has won numerous awards for her research and community work, including the Order of the Baobab (Silver) conferred on her by the President of South Africa in April 2016. In August 2014 CEO magazine named her the most influential woman academic in Africa, in August 2016 she was awarded the prestigious Businesswoman of the Year Award in the education category and in 2020 she was included in Forbes’ inaugural list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Africa. In July 2019 the University of Bristol conferred on her an Honorary Doctorate in Science in recognition of her leadership role in mathematics education in South Africa.
Kgethi, as she is popularly known, was elected as a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) in November 2007; an honorary member of the Golden Key International Honour Society in May 2009, an honorary life member of the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa (AMESA) in July 2009 and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences in 2018. In 2008 she became the first black South African researcher to be appointed to co-chair a study commissioned by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction. The study entitled “mathematics and language diversity” has completed its work and published a volume in 2016, which she co-edited.
She is a member of the board of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls (OWLAG); a trustee of the FirstRand Foundation and the South African Student Solidarity Foundation for Education (SASSFE). In 2016 she was appointed by the then Deputy President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, to chair the Human Resource Development Council standing committee on Mathematics and Science Education. She served as member of the board of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and chaired its Research Development and Innovation Committee from January 2015 till September 2017. She was elected in 2011 as the first woman President of the Convocation of the University of the Witwatersrand and served for five years till 2016. She led the Association for Mathematics Education of South Africa (AMESA) as its first woman National President from 2002 to 2006, served as founding chairperson of the Board of the South African Mathematics Foundation (SAMF) from 2004 to 2006 and secretary and member of the executive committee of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) from 2003 to 2007.
Kgethi is founder of the Adopt-a-learner Foundation (www.adopt-a-learner.com), a non-profit organisation that started in 2004 and provides financial and educational support to students from township and rural areas to acquire higher education qualifications.
Rosalind Searle
Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Psychology at the Adam Smith Business School.
University of Glasgow
Rosalind Searle holds the chair in Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology at the University of Glasgow’s Adam Smith Business School, in Scotland. She took up her chair at Glasgow at the end of 2017 from Coventry University where she was a folder of their Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations. She has a PhD is from Aston University.
Prof. Searle is also founder director of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology’s Impact Incubator, leading the translation of scientific research in work and organisational psychology for policymaker and practitioners. She is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS), and the Royal Society of Arts, and an academic fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personal and Development (CIPD).
Her research focuses on organisational trust is wide ranging with attention on HRM and its role, trust and control, change processes, living wages and decent work, and counterproductive work behaviours and organisational distrust. She strives to make her research more accessible using aminations and games technologies as a way to transfer knowledge.
She is co-editor for the Routledge Companion to Trust (2018), and editor and author of a number of books on trust and HR. She is editor of the Edward Elgar Frontiers in Trust Research book series. She serves on editorial boards of Human Relations, Journal of Management, and International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation (IPP), and the Journal of Trust Research. Her research has appeared in leading international journals (e.g. Human Resource Management, Journal of Organisational Behavior, International Journal of HRM, Organisation Studies, and Long Range Planning). She has been commissioned to undertake research for regulators (e.g. Professional Standards Authority), government (e.g. Welsh Audit, Scottish and English Governments) and private organisations (e.g. energy sector).
She is a member of project GLOW – a 26 country partnership focused on living wages. Working along side Living Wage (Scotland) her work is informing helping to change employers and policy makers attitudes towards the role and value of decent work.
Marlon Parker
Founder of Reconstructed Living Labs
Experienced Founder with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Passion for technology and innovation has influenced his work and led to being the founder of the Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs). RLabs is a global movement that have inspired replication of the model in 23 countries and impacted more than 20 Million people since its inception. He has been listed as one of the 100 World Class South Africans, an alumni of President Obama’s Young African Leaders initiative and an honorary faculty member of the International School of Digital Transformation. He was also selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Dangote Fellow and an Ashoka Fellow for his work in Social Entrepreneurship. He was the co-founder of JamiiX that was the backbone to one of the largest mobile chat networks in the world with more than 4.5 million people being reached since its inception. He was the Lead SA Hero of 2015, was listed by Quartz as one of the African Innovators of 2017 and the Schwab Foundation Social Innovator of the Year 2022. Marlon has done extensive work with organisations such as Mozilla, BBC, Facebook, Finnish Foreign Ministry, Unicef, UNWomen, Naspers, AWS, Google, World Bank and Accenture.
Melissa Steyn
Professor at the Wits Centre for Diversity and holder of the South African National Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies.
University of the Witwatersand
A Fulbright alumnus, Melissa Steyn holds the South African National Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies. She has been developing Diversity Studies as a field in Higher Education, first at the University of Cape Town and more recently as the founding director of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Her work engages with intersecting hegemonic social formations, but she is best known for her publications on whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa. Her book, Whiteness just isn’t what is used to be: White identity in a changing South Africa (2001, SUNY Press,) won the 2002 Outstanding Scholarship Award in International and Intercultural Communication from the National Communication Association in the United States. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters, she is editor or co-editor of five books. She was featured as one of Routledge’s Sociology Super Authors for 2013.
Melissa is a recipient of the University of Cape Town’s Distinguished Teacher’s Award (2009), and the South African Council for Higher Education National Excellence in Teaching Award (2010). She holds a University of Southampton Diamond Jubilee International Fellowship. Melissa chairs the South African Anti-Racism Network in Higher Education.
Amanda Gouws
Professor of Political Science and holder of the South African National Research Chair in Gender Politics.
University of Stellenbosch
Amanda Gouws is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Stellenbosch University where she holds a SARChI Chair in Gender Politics. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the USA. Her specialization is South African Politics and Gender Politics. Her research focuses on women and citizenship, the National Gender Machinery, women’s representation and gender based violence, and she has published widely in these areas. She is the editor of (Un)Thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa. (UK: Ashgate and Cape Town: Juta, 2005). In 2007 she was the Edith Keeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at Northwestern University, USA. In 2012 she received the Wilma Rule Award for the best paper at the International Political Science Association Conference in Madrid, Spain, in the category Gender and Politics with the title “Multiculturalism in South Africa: Dislodging the Binary between Universal Human Rights and Culture/Tradition”. Her co-edited book with Daiva Stasiulis Gender and Multiculturalism: North/South Perspectives appeared with Routledge Press in 2014. In 2017 a co-edited book with Joy Watson, Nasty Women Talk Back, appeared with Imbali Press and in 2021 she co-edited a book with Olivia Ezeobi “COVID Diaries: Women’s Experience of the Pandemic” that also appeared with Imbali Press. Her edited book “Feminist Institutionalism in South Africa: Designing for Equality” is forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield in 2022.
She was a Commissioner for the South African Commission for Gender Equality from 2012-2014.
Nyimpini Mabunda
CEO Southern Africa
General Electric
Nyimpini Mabunda is the CEO for Southern Africa at General Electric. He has 25+ years background leading major consumer goods, food franchise, and telecoms businesses across Africa and the United Kingdom. Prior to joining GE, he fulfilled roles at the Country/Divisional CEO level for two major multinational businesses – Vodafone/ Vodacom and Diageo.
His expertise in strategy, marketing, sales, digital transformation, data analytics, business turnaround, private equity, stakeholder management, and market development define him as a well-rounded leader who has an impressive track record of driving results and talent development.
Nyimpini is a recognized industry leader who sits on a few external boards as non-executive director and chairman. He is also a former senior advisor for Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he assisted the partners to build the business in Technology, Media, and Telecom (TMT) and Consumer Good Practices across sub-Saharan Africa. Nyimpini who holds an MBA from the University of Cape Town is a regular speaker and panelist at industry events, some highlights include his role as a judge and panelist at the Stanford University’s Africa Business Forum start up initiative, emcee at the official Nelson Mandela Memorial in Uganda, and moderator at the ILLA Africa lawmakers conference.
More recently Nyimpini was appointed Chair of U.S. Chamber’s U.S.-South Africa Business Council, the premier Washington-based business organization dedicated to the economic relationship between the United States and South Africa. The Council represents America’s leading companies doing business with South Africa, and it is comprised of senior executives of U.S. companies from every sector investing in South Africa.
Gareth Ackerman
Chairman
Chairman of the corporate governance committee and the nominations committee
An executive at Pick n Pay for 15 years until 1999, Gareth headed up various divisions and served as Joint Group Managing Director and the Managing Director of Pick n Pay Group Enterprises. He was appointed to the Board in 1990 as an executive director, until becoming a non-executive director in 1999. From 2002 to 2010 Gareth was Chairman of Pick n Pay Holdings Limited, which at that time was the ultimate holding company of the Group. In 2010 he was appointed non-executive Chairman of Pick n Pay Stores Limited.
Among his other involvements, Gareth is co-chair of the Consumer Goods Council of South Africa, and is previous co-chair of the international Consumer Goods Forum. He is also a Trustee of the Masisizane Fund and was a Member of the International Board of the Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO). He chairs the Ackerman Family interests.
