Professor Pamela Abbot is a long-term Research Associate at IPAR-Rwanda. She is currently a professor in the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen and Director of the Centre for Global Development. She also a member of the Centre for Civil Society and the Rule of Law and the New Europe Centre.

He main research interests are in gender, wellbeing, quality of life and social quality, and social, economic and political transformations. She has carried out research in the UK, the European Union, the former Soviet Union, East Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. Prof. Pamela is an author (with Claire Wallace and Melissa Taylor) of the best selling text An Introduction to Sociology : Feminist Perspectives (3rd edition 2005), Routledge. Her most recent books are (with Andrea Teti, Valeria Talbot and Paolo Maggiolini) Democratisation against Democracy : How the EU Fails the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillian, published in January 2020 and ; (with Andrea Teti and Francesco Cavatorta) The Arab Uprisings in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia : Social, Economic and Political Transformations in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillian, published in January 2018. She has published more than 50 articles in peer review journals. Her work has been published in English, French, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Korean and Chinese.

She is directing the Fostering a Social Practice Approach to Adult Literacies for Improving People’s Quality of Life in Western Rwanda, a project funded under the Scottish Government’s Scotland Rwanda Programme (£1.2m, 2017-22) and is implemented by IPAR-Rwanda. She is a co-investigator on a project funded by the International Development Research Centre, Canada " Providing Timely Evidence to Facilitate the Socio-Economic Recovery from the Covid-19 Pandemic in Rwanda (2020-2023)" run by IPAR-Rwanda ; on a UK R&I funded project on federalism in the Horn of Africa (2020-2023) ; and on an AHRC funded project Toward the Development of Post Covid-19 Gender Policy Measures to End Modern Slavery and Exploitation in the Bangladeshi Garment Sector.

Dr Alexandre Simons is currently a research associate at the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR-Rwanda), Integrated Expert at the German cooperation (GIZ), corresponding author at the Economic school of Louvain and invited lecturer at University of Rwanda. Alexandre holds a PhD in Economics and a master of political sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). He has worked for ten years in research in the fields of among others impact evaluations, micro-analysis, employment, education, tax, water, investment and poverty. He has experience supervising surveys, both quantitative and qualitative.

He has led and participated in various studies including the evaluation of performance contracts (Imihigo) of Ministers and Mayors in Rwanda, the setting of new tariffs for rural water in Rwanda, the update of the master plan of Kigali and the tax reform in Belgium, to cite a few. He served as Director of Research at IPAR Rwanda for five five years until mid 2021. Before joining IPAR, Alexandre was working at the Itinera Institute, the leading think tank on Belgian affairs based in Brussels.

Dr. Charles J. Kiiza holds a doctorate and a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Dr. Kiiza specializes in conflict resolution and diplomacy. He has written a number of policy-oriented research works in an attempt to contribute toward viable solutions to the conflicts in the East African Region. His work, which spans more than two decades, both as an academic and practitioner in various academic and government institutions in a number of countries in the East African region, which include Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and in South Africa, endows him with broad experience, skills, and expertise in regional conflict dynamics.

Dr. Kiiza’s intense desire for serving and contributing to resolving conflicts has motivated him to reconcile and broker complex social wrangles between individuals by skillfully applying conflicting resolution strategies (e.g., land conflict).

Dr. Kiiza has also a very rich and broad academic and research experience in lecturing and supervising both undergraduate and postgraduate students’ research projects. Dr. Kiiza’s experience as a practitioner especially in areas of policy analysis and conflict resolution enables him to blend relevant theoretical perspectives with practical perspectives suitable for effective learning and research.