At the time of this interview, Miguel de Brito was Mozambique country director for the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, a position he had held for three years.  He began his career as a researcher at the International Relations Institute of Mozambique in 1994.  In 1995 he started working for the United Nations Development Programme, where he worked on a comparative research project called War-Torn Societies.  De Brito spent seven years working as a senior democracy and governance adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Maputo before joining EISA.

Alfredo Gamito served as the minister of state administration in Mozambique from 1995 to 2000. In this position, he managed a broad reform agenda that included decentralizing the state administration as well as professionalizing the civil service. Gamito began his career in the private sector before being appointed as the secretary of the state cashew company. He also served as the vice minister of agriculture and the governor of Nampula province. At the time of this interview, Gamito was a member of the National Assembly,where he was chairman of the Commission on Public Administration, Local Power and the Mass Media.

Ismael Valigy began his career at the Ministry of Education in the late 1970s. In 1990 he began working as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two years later, during the Mozambican peace negotiations that spanned the early 1990s, Valigy was invited to represent the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a group that the government established to help organize the country’s first election after a 15-year civil war. In late 1993 the ruling party nominated Valigy to serve on the country’s newly established Central Election Commission.  After the elections he continued his career as a diplomat, which included a posting to Washington, D.C.