At the time of this interview, Saah Charles N’Tow was Liberia’s minister of youth and sports. He previously served as the program director of the President’s Young Professional Program (PYPP) and John Snow Inc.’s (JSI) Scott Family Liberia Fellows Program. He formerly served as a conflict sensitivity and training officer for the United Nations (UN) Liberia Peacebuilding Office. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Liberia and his master’s degree in humanitarian assistance from Tufts University. 

At the time of this interview, Stanley Murage was an engineering consultant. Prior to that he had served as Special Adviser to President Mwai Kibaki for strategic policy analysis. He had previously held other government posts, including Permanent Secretary of Labor, Transport and Communications, and Public Works. Early in his career he served in the public service as a surveyor. In 2005, he was awarded the Chief of the Order of the Burning Spear (CBS) for his government service. 

At the time of this interview, Harold Jonathan Monger was director general of the Liberia Institute of Public Administration (LIPA). He has a bachelor of science from Liberia’s Cuttington University and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Southern California. And he has extensive public- and private-sector experience in civil-service capacity building, having been with both the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund as well as a Ghanaian consulting company. He has been at LIPA since 2004.

At the time of this interview, Gregory Ellis had been a senior operations officer at the Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group at the World Bank for about a year. His parent organization was the Australian Agency for International Development. He was posted by AusAID in the Solomon Islands between 2005 and 2007, as deputy program manager for the Machinery of Government Program, part of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands. Prior to that, between 2000 and 2002 he held a posting in Timor-Leste after the withdrawal of Indonesian forces. 

Mr. Ram Prasad Ghimire was in charge of the Organization and Development Section of the Ministry of General Administration (MOGA). He began his career in the Nepalese Civil Service in 1995 as a finance officer. He later served on the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, National Planning Commission, and was responsible for one of Nepal’s academies of management. 

At the time of this interview, Joshua Galeforolwe was the chief executive officer of the Public Enterprise Evaluation and Privatisation Agency in Botswana.  Prior to creating and running PEEPA, Galeforolwe was general manager of Air Botswana.  Under his leadership, the airline was restructured and made a profit for the first time since it was established in the 1960s.   He earneds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Makerere University in Uganda and a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland.

Alejandro Echeverri was the director general of the Urban Development Company from 2004-2005 and the director of urban projects for the mayor's office of Medellin, Colombia from 2005-2007 under Mayor Sergio Fajardo.  He is an architect by training and was a professor of architecture at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Among his many architecture awards, his work with Mayor Fajardo in urban renewal won them both the Curry Stone Prize for Transformative Public Works from Architecture for Humanity in 2009. Their urban renewal projects have been praised not just for revitalizing poor neighborhoods but also for the quality and innovation of the architecture itself.