The Right Honourable Lord Alton of Liverpool |
Lord Alton was elected as a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party in 1979 and was at that point the youngest MP in the House of Commons. He was a member of the House of Commons for eighteen years and served at various times as a spokesman for Home and Environmental Affairs and as Chief Whip. In 1997, he was made a life peer and took his seat in the House of Lord as a crossbencher. An internationally renowned human rights activist, Lord Alton is the chairman of the All-Parliamentary Group on North Korea and was one of the first British politicians to visit that country. His travels have also taken him to Burma, Congo and the Sudan. Lord Alton is passionate about fostering a generation of young people who strive to be men and women for others – a vision that also underpins the work of CDI.
|
Kate Dyer |
Kate Dyer is an international development/aid professional. She lived and worked in Tanzania for 17 years - most recently as Director of a major £35million 6-year programme governance and accountability programme administered by KPMG. She is a specialist in governance, social development and inclusion, as well as having particular interests in strategic planning and in monitoring, evaluation and learning systems. A Cambridge graduate, Kate Dyer is supporting CDI’s efforts to ensure that all four of our projects are relevant to Tanzanians and engage Tanzanian government at local and national levels - the surest way to achieve scale for a small organisation like CDI.
|
Dr Peter Collins
|
Peter is the CEO of Permasense, a developer and manufacturer of sensor systems for oil and gas facility integrity management. With a PhD in Computational Fluid Dyanmics from Imperial College London, Peter has held board-level technical and operational roles in public and private companies with $100m+ revenues and has led Permasense from the lab at Imperial College London to the #1 market position in over 30 countries worldwide, including the US, China, Germany and Korea. CDI is excited to have Peter on board, bringing with him a wealth of knowledge and experience, particularly with respect to his commercial acumen
|
Patrick Hoffmann |
Patrick is the co-founder of the Cambridge Development Initiative, the product of a keen interest in African development that goes back to a cultural exchange with Zimbabwe in 2010. As Joint Chairman for the first 18 months, Patrick managed the design and development of CDI’s four projects and brought together a wide network of stakeholders that made this ambitious idea reality. Now he is looking forward to pursue the more long-term vision of changing the way student volunteering is done and identifying how university students can best contribute to innovative development work globally. Beyond CDI, Patrick has used his time at Cambridge to write on Britain’s China Policy, head a university-wide energy-saving project, and design and teach a political education programme for activists of the National League for Democracy in Myanmar.
|
Kelvin Wong |
Kelvin joined Patrick on a mission to reimagine student volunteering after a fateful conversation in a Cambridge bar. His experience as a banking intern and a careers society president made him an unlikely leader of CDI, but he was inspired by the potential of a holistic programme of projects that make use of the sheer diversity of skills among Cambridge students. Kelvin found himself exploring partnerships with leading NGOs and liaising with multinationals to supply medicines to Dar es Salaam’s slums. As Joint Chairman and Entrepreneurship Director, Kelvin oversaw the development of CDI’s four projects and co-led the organisation’s first ever fundraising campaign; what excites him the most, however, is the summer trip’s potential to catalyse unprecedented personal development in its volunteers and produce leaders with the capacity to change the world.
|
Georgia Ware |
Georgia was involved with CDI from its official launch in January 2014, volunteering as part of the Entrepreneurship team that summer before becoming the Entrepreneurship Project Director the following year. She went back to Dar in her final year of studies as part of her Masters project, working with TechforTrade to investigate the feasibility of selling 3D printed microscopes in East Africa. Since graduating, she has been working in management consultancy, particularly enjoying her time on a social impact project looking at how the client could expand sustainably in the UK.
|
Rajan Bhopal |
As a former CDI Project Director and volunteer, Rajan has an excellent insight into the great opportunities and challenges for students’ volunteering. He was hooked by CDI’s model after the first summer: two months working with a team of British and Tanzanian students, and with pupils and teachers from two Dar es Salaam secondary schools, to improve the outcomes of secondary education. Taking on Project Director responsibilities to lead the design and implementation of the project’s second year gave him a much greater understanding of what CDI’s ambitious definition of volunteering requires. In his professional career, Rajan uses his process engineering training to improve water, sanitation and agriculture infrastructure and service delivery. He brings to the board his personal experience, technical knowledge and a deep interest in the skills development of our volunteers.
|
Gabby Arenge |
Gabby has eight years of experience designing, researching, and leading education initiatives in East and Southern Africa, the UK, and the US in partnership with NGOs, multilateral institutions, and research centres. She served as CDI’s Vice President while completing her MPhil in Education at Cambridge in 2016. Currently, she is researching the processes of pedagogic change in Botswana as a PhD candidate at Cambridge's Faculty of Education. Gabby also serves as a Real-time Scaling Lab Researcher with the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, a Curriculum and Innovation Specialist with Young 1ove in Botswana, and a World Bank Teach consultant.
|
Micheala Chan |
Micheala Chan holds a BA and MEng in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering from Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, and is a civil engineer working in the water sector. She has been involved with CDI since 2018, and was instrumental in the handover of the simplified sewerage project to the Dar es Salaam Water Supply and Sanitation Authority. She brings to the Board her institutional knowledge and on-the-ground experience of the WaSH Project, a keen insight into water and sanitation as one part of a more holistic development strategy, and a strong belief in the good that CDI can do if it faces up to the challenges inherent in international development.
|
Rebecca Donaldson |
Becky joined the Entrepreneurship project in 2017 as a volunteer in her first year at Cambridge. Alongside her bioengineering degree, she co-founded Blue Tap, a social enterprise developing and implementing low-cost water purification technology in emerging markets. In 2019, she led a partnership between CDI and Blue Tap to run a feasibility study of table-top water filters in Dar es Salaam. Since graduating, she has started work full time at Blue Tap doing a wide variety of tasks from technology development to market research to strategizing implementation.
|