Dr Osanjo is the director of the School of The Arts and Design. Her interests are in design research, design management and entrepreneurship. She is passionate about African design and has written and made several presentations on the same. She has been involved in product development training of artisans in countries including Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda and Kenya. She is a partner in the Learning Network on Sustainability (LeNSes) Africa, a founder member of Design Kenya Society (DKS), Pan Afrikan Design Institute (PADI) and Kenya Fashion Council (KFCO).
Kenya
Professor Agberia is responsible for curating and managing institutional, local and international exhibitions! He is a keen academic, and has received Academic and scholarly fellowship awards from the US, and the UK. Some of these awards include the University of Londons AG Leventis Fellowship of School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Research Fellowship of Sainsbury Research Unit, the University of Oxford’s Titular Fellowship at the Pitt Rivers Museum (2009) and GETTY Foundation, California, USA. He is currently a Professor of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, continues to collaborate and partner with Dallas Artists and Designers of Texas in the United States.
Nigeria
Design research is imperative to advance the continent’s development. Dr Moalosi's specialization and research interest areas include the following: design and culture, design education, sustainable design, social innovation, additive manufacturing, and post-graduate students’ supervision. He has also published extensively in international peer-reviewed journals, contributed book chapters, published books and presented at many international peer-reviewed conferences.
Botswana
Adrienne Viljoen has advocated for design development in disadvantaged Afrikan communities and developed the Network of African Designers Charter. She’s served on the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design twice (from 1995 – 1999, and again from 2003 -2007). She Initiated the 2009 ICSID Interdesign on Water, and the 2005 Interdesign on Sustainable Rural Transport programmes. And was the South African Project Lead for the benchmark International Design Alliance World Design Survey in 2008. She served on the International Advisory Committee of World Design Capital Seoul 2010 and as advisor for the successful Cape Town 2014 World Design Capital bid committee in 2011. She currently serves as an SABS Fellow for the South African Bureau of Standards, and continues to serve on juries (including the Top 100 Technology companies in SA)
South Africa
Exposure is critical for human development. Professor Mugendi is widely travelled, and has taught in Kenya, Botswana, South Africa and Sweden! He is very passionate about various expressions of socially conscious design, which include; Designerly Strategies for Mitigating Climate Change; Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability; Distributed Renewable Energy; Indigenous Knowledge Systems; Participatory Design; and Universal/Inclusive Design.
Most of all, this nominee has a special interest in the pivotal role that design thinking has in the advancement of the developmental agenda on the African continent. He is also a founding member of the Network of Afrika Designers (NAD). He is also associated with a number of other international design networks. He is President Emeritus and Convenor of the Senate of the World Design Organization, where he continues to support the industrial design industries quest to resolve wicked problems.
Kenya
To design is to be human, and to be human is to share your life with others. Ato deGraft-Johnson has won numerous awards, has exhibited on numerous occasions, and has attended many workshops and conferences. For over twenty years, he was instrumental in building Communication for Development through his work with NGOs and government agencies. His illustrations used in development publications are in the public domain and can be widely seen in use in East and Southern Africa.
He graduated with a B.A. Art (First Class Honours), in 1977. He then went on to obtain an MSc in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, in New York in 1983. He was employed as a Lecturer with the Department of Communication Design, Faculty of Art at KNUST, where he worked till his retirement in 2014.
Ghana
Professor Des has dedicated his life to design. He’s well-travelled, and has presented papers, served on panels and conducted design workshops in the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ghana, Botswana and South Africa. He’s also juried for many local and international design competitions, and is the only person in the world to have served on four international bodies, which include the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers as President and Fellow, Design for the World Barcelona, Spain (as Fellow and Board Member), the International Council of Design (as a Vice President), and the Pan Afrikan Design Institute, as President. He’s also the founder and past president of the African Institute for the Interior Design Professions. (IID), and is an Honorary member of the European Council for Interior Architecture, (ECIA). He is presently the CEO of Greenside Design Center, a world-renowned design education institution in South Africa, which he co-founded with Ingrid Leujes in 1987.
South Africa
Saki Mafundikwa has an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University, before working in New York as a Graphic Designer. His award-winning first film, “Shungu: The Resilience of a People” had its world premiere at 2009’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). He’s widely published, and he’s lectured widely, with workshops run in Europe, North, South and Central America, and Afrika. He was a speaker at TED2013 in Long Beach, California, and he keynoted the first-ever Pan African Design Institute conference in Ghana in February of 2019. He also spoke at the TED/PMI event in Dar-es-Salaam. Passionate about documenting African writing systems, this Nominee is also famous for “Afrikan Alphabets: the Story of Writing in Africa” the first-ever book on Afrikan typography!
Zimbabwe
The Simba Club, also known as the PADI Fellowship, is a fellow award of Pan Afrikan Design Institute which also serves as council of Design Elders. The awardees are recognised for their lifetime and/or outstanding contribution to the development of design practice, design education and design advocacy in their individual countries and/or across Afrika as a whole.