At the time of this interview, Robertson Allotey had been acting chief director at the Ministry of Public Sector Reform in Ghana for six months.  Allotey began his career in civil service reform in 1998, when he was the director in charge of the Customer Services Improvement Unit in the office of the head of civil service. He earned a master’s degree in urban policy and housing and was particularly interested in the accessibility of urban housing stock and what factors made people content with their environments. Improvement of public service delivery to citizens played an important role and prepared him for his work with the civil service to improve delivery of services. 

At the time of this interview, Fatbardh Kadilli was adviser to the prime minister on anti-corruption matters, a position he had held since 2005.  Prior to that he served for four years as a consultant on anti-corruption with an American firm financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Prior to that he led a program on integrated services for children at UNICEF. From 1998 to 2005, he was also a consultant with the Institute for Contemporary Studies, where, among other tasks, he advised the government on decentralization reforms. Earlier, he served in the State Secretariat for Local Governance, where he was in charge of the Refugee Office and drafted the law on asylum seekers.

At the time of this interview, Zef Preci was the founding head of the independent, non-governmental Albanian Center for Economic Research, established in 1992 as Albania's first independent, non-governmental organization dedicated to research and analysis in support of a market economy and democracy. He served briefly in 2000 as the minister of public economy and privatization before he returned to ACER as its director. Later, he was an adviser to Albania's president and chairman of the Authority for Competition.  During his career, he also was a lecturer in entrepreneurial economics at Tirana University.

At the time of this interview, Denis Biseko was the senior public sector specialist for the World Bank in Tanzania, where he managed a World Bank project involving public financial management reform and legal and judicial reform. Before joining the World Bank, he was a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he worked primarily on public sector reform and organization and capacity building.

At the time of this interview, Pravin Gordhan was minister of finance for South Africa. He was the commissioner of the South African Revenue Service from 1999 to 2009. Before his career in government, Gordhan played a prominent role in the South African liberation movement; in the 1980s, he was secretary of Operation Vula, the African National Congress underground organization.

At the time of this interview, Bernard Zeneli was the manager of the Brain Gain program, an initiative of the Albanian government supported by the United Nations Development Programme that encouraged skilled professionals to return to the country and contribute to its development.  Previously, he was head of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Pristina in Kosovo, where he developed courses related to policy making, comparative politics, government and international relations.  He also taught at Northeastern University, the University of Tirana and South Eastern European University in Tetovo, Macedonia.

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. 

At the time of this interview, Selina Mkony was program coordinator at the Public Service Management Office in Tanzania. She joined the Civil Service Department in 1994 as an accountant and was later assigned administrative duties as well. The Civil Service Reform Program lasted from 1994 to 1998, when a new program was developed to focus on institution performance management systems and making the public service efficient. She continued on as an accountant and administrator before a new phase began in 2007. At that time, she became the program coordinator. 

Joseph Rugumyamheto worked in several capacities in the Tanzanian civil service for 30 years, ultimately serving for five years as permanent secretary of public service management in the President’s Office. He was responsible for the management of all civil servants in the Tanzanian government in terms of human resources and development. He previously served as chairman of the Government Board of the Eastern and Southern African Management Institute and chairman of the Board of Global Development Learning Centre Network. Rugumyamheto retired in 2006, and at the time of the interview he was chairman of the board and a director of Douglas Lake Minerals Ltd., a joint-venture company holding mineral concession rights in Tanzania. In April 2006, he was awarded the Jit Gill Memorial Award for Outstanding Public Service by the World Bank.

At the time of this interview, Charles Sokile was the public sector adviser for the Tanzania office of the U.K.'s Department for International Development.