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.

Hadi Soesastro, an economist and public intellectual, was one of the founders of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and at the time of the interview he was the executive director of the center, with which he had been involved for 38 years. He was a member of the National Economic Council of Indonesia. He served as an adviser to late former President Abdurrahman Wahid, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Soesastro held a doctoral degree in economics and had taught widely, including at Columbia University in New York. He died in May 2010. 

Bitange Ndemo is the Permanent Secretary of the Kenyan Government’s Ministry of Information and Communication. Prior to joining the civil service in 2005, Ndemo was a senior lecturer and head of research and consultancy at the University of Nairobi’s School of Business. As a scholar, he specialized in business methods and entrepreneurship. Dr. Ndemo had previously worked as a financial system analyst at Medtronic Inc., a Fortune 500 company in the US (1989-1993). He has a PhD in industrial economics from the University of Sheffield, UK, and management and finance degrees from the University of Minnesota, US.

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, Shadi Baki was the director of the Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS), a directory within the Civil Service Agency of the Republic of Liberia. He has extensive experience in IT (information technology) management. One of his first appointments was as system administrator and head of the IT lab at his alma mater, American Episcopal Zion Community College in Liberia. He was later hired as a junior analyst for the Ministry of Finance in the Liberian government. Before joining the Liberian Civil Service Agency, he served as information technology manager for a group of manufacturing companies in Ghana. In 2008, as part of the Senior Executive program, he joined the CSA as a records management specialist, followed by his appointment as director of HRMIS. 

V. Ravichandar served as a member of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) from 2000 to 2004. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) and an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). Prior to working with BATF, Ravichandar was a consultant with MICO-Bosch. In 1988, he founded Feedback Consulting, a research and consulting company that assesses business opportunities in India.  Since leaving his post with BATF, he has been associated with HR Trust, a not-for-profit organization that seeks to enable human capital in India. At the time of this interview, Ravichandar still worked for Feedback Consulting    

At the time of this interview, Kartlos Kipiani was the chief of staff of the Constitutional Court of Georgia, a position he held from 2006 until March 2010.  In April 2010 he became deputy head of the Government Chancellery.  He previously served as secretary of the Public Service Council and acting head of the Public Service Bureau.  Kipiani also headed the Division for Civil Service Reform under the previous government in 2000.  He worked on various programs as a coordinator for the United Nations Development Programme.  He first began working for the government in the Office of State Chancellery in 1995.  Kipiani earned a master's degree in public policy from Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Public Policy Studies at Saitama University in 2003.

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, Albert Bockarie was senior permanent secretary of the Public Service Commission of Sierra Leone.  He had served since 1982 at the provincial level as a district officer and in all the national ministries in the government of Sierra Leone except Trade and Finance, Foreign Affairs, Finance and Education.