Dr. Hicks is a former senior commissioner with South Africa’s Commission on Gender Equality. She has more than two decades of experience working with South African civil society and educational institutions and is widely published in the areas of participatory democracy, gender issues, and issues around access to education for women in South Africa. She is currently an academic in the Law Faculty at UKZN.

Shola has been with SIT programs in various capacities since 1992. Prior to that, she worked in administrative capacities with nongovernmental groups, some of which were active in the anti-apartheid struggle.

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Dr. Buccus has an undergraduate degree in education, a master’s degree in social policy from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), and a PhD that straddled Radboud Nijemegen University in the Netherlands and the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. He is widely published in academic journals and book chapters and is the former editor of the journal Critical Dialogue. He is a columnist for South Africa’s most widely publication, The Daily Maverick, and is often called upon by television and radio stations to offer political analysis.

During apartheid, Dr. Buccus was active in student politics. In 2008, he was an Open Society Foundation Media Fellow and in 2009, he appeared on the prestigious Mail & Guardian list of South Africa’s 200 Leading Young South Africans. He worked as academic coordinator at Workers’ College, a progressive college for trade union members. He was involved in multiple international research projects and co-authored the National Framework on Public Participation for the South African government. During his time at the Centre for Public Participation, he led an initiative to bring policymaking spaces closer to ordinary people and led a project to assess participatory democracy in Namibia.