GAMES FOR CHANGE SPEAKERS
Glenn Gillis
Co-Founder, CEO, Chairperson
Company – Sea Monster, Games for Change Africa
Glenn Gillis
Co-Founder and CEO of Sea Monster; Chairperson of G4CA
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Glenn is the co-founder and CEO of Sea Monster. He has a Business Science degree from the University of Cape Town and has been a senior executive, consultant and entrepreneur for over 25 years. Prior to Sea Monster, Glenn served as the General Manager at two of South Africa’s leading film and animation companies: Moonlighting Film Services and Clockwork Zoo – Africa’s largest animation studio at the time.
Glenn is an expert on the role that technology plays in storytelling and a thought-leader on how serious games and immersive technologies (AR & VR) can be used to drive social change and business goals at scale.
Walid Sultan Midani
Founder & CEO
Company – DigitalMania Studio
Walid Sultan Midani
Founder and CEO of DigitalMania Studio
Location: Tunisia, Africa
A video game enthusiast and pioneer in Africa, Walid Sultan Midani is the founder and CEO of DigitalMania Studio, the first video game development studio in Tunisia that currently specializes in VR and AR games for team building.
Walid is also the founder of YouRun, a video game studio and publisher based In Malta which focuses 100% on casual competitive games with the game: Warshmallows.
Walid also mentors other entrepreneurs who are working to establish their startups and raise funds. Outside of business, Walid collaborates with NGOs advocating freedom of speech and minority empowerment. Walid graduated in 2008 from ESPRIT-Tunisia with a degree in IT engineering.
Lebo Lekoma
Head of Client Services
Company – Sea Monster
Lebo Lekoma
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Lebo Lekoma is the current head of client services at Sea Monster. Before deciding to change direction and enroll at AFDA, he studied engineering and spent a year with the Nuclear Energy Corporation of SA. After completing his postgraduate studies, he completed 24 commercials in just 18 months, thereafter joining the business development team at the Waterfront Studios Ngage division.
Lebo joined Sea Monster as production manager before moving into his current role. With more than 10 years’ experience in working with clients he is able to understand and translate their needs in order to deliver solutions, while balancing this against the needs of Sea Monster. He has gained great levels of trust in developing solid business solutions for clients.
Eyram Tawia
CEO and Co-Founder
Company – Leti Arts
Eyram Tawia
CEO and Co-Founder, Leti Arts
Location: Ghana, Africa
Eyram Tawia is CEO and co-founder of Leti Arts, an interactive digital studio that creates Afrocentric mobile games and comics. His love for comics and computer games helped to spur his interest to learn to program while in junior high school as he wanted to make the comics he drew as a youngster come to life on the computer screen. He is convinced that Africa will make a salient contribution to the world of game development and believes that this will create new job opportunities that will boost Africa’s GDP.
Eyram is a frequent speaker at tech conferences and has had stints at the Game Developers Conference and the US-Africa Business Leaders Summit. He has won several awards for his contribution to the industry including the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneurs Media Awards (2012), Vodafone Ghana and Global Appstar 2014 competition and the Africa Entrepreneurship Award. In his bid to promote African success, he published his ‘unfolding’ biography Uncompromising Passion: The Humble Beginnings of an African Video Games Industry documenting his journey while aiming to inspire young Africans to tell our stories.
Franziska Elsaesser
EMEA Cross-Google Partner Manager & DEI Gaming Lead
Company – Google
Franziska Elsaesser
EMEA Cross-Google Partner Manager and DEI Gaming Lead, Google
Location: Berlin, Germany
Franziska Elsaesser is the EMEA Cross-Google Partner Manager and DEI Gaming Lead. She is working across all Google Gaming solutions to deliver long term positive impact for the biggest EMEA partners and is focusing on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives to drive change in the Gaming Ecosystem.
Prior to this role, she has been working in various roles in App Sales and Ads Product at Google. Franziska holds a master degree in media management
Claudia Owusu, Ghana/USA & Ife Oluwamuyide, Nigeria/USA
Claudia Owusu, Ghana/USA & Ife Oluwamuyide, Nigeria/USA
Ghanaian/Nigerian artists Ife Oluwamuyide and Claudia Owusu created a documentary film called “Ampe: Leap into the Sky, Black Girl”.
Set in Accra, Ghana and their hometown Columbus, OH, the film highlights the journey of Black Girlhood, and the relationships that Ghanaian girls have with their childhood selves through the lens of the traditional game, ampe.
Ampe is a high-energy game played by girls in Ghana, West Africa. It includes jumping, clapping, and an all-around cheer as two teams select a stepping pattern and face off. The teams have leading players, referred to as “mothers”, who start the game and encourage players to compete at their best. The innate joy and competitive edge of ampe reveals the desire that Black girls have to be set free and feel a range of emotions without judgment.
Nyambura M. Waruingi
Company – Akoia & Company Ltd
Nyambura M. Waruingi, Founder and Creative Director of Akoia & Company Ltd
Location: Kenya, Africa
Nyambura M. Waruingi is a storyteller across many artistic expressions and the Founder and Creative Director of Akoia & Company Ltd.
With over 20 years of international experience in creative and cultural industries, she experiments with unique ways to imagine new worlds through filmmaking, immersive storytelling and gaming.
She founded Akoia & Company Ltd to produce projects that transform our perception of the world around us. Akoia & Company Ltd partners with a variety of international cultural institutions, and innovative interactive & immersive production studios to engage authentically with audiences, provoke bold conversations, and produce visionary projects.
Currently, Nyambura M. Waruingi is producing ‘The Ground Screams To Whisper’, a transmedia immersive experience about the resilience, courage, and triumph of female freedom fighters, re-living their often-erased stories, which shaped Kenya’s independence struggle. The project merges Nyambura’s artistic pursuits across animation, installation arts, and extended reality. #imagineradically
Dean Gichukie
CEO & Game Producer AND Co-founder & Growth Lead
Company – Kunta Content AND
Dean Gichukie
CEO & Game Producer, Kunta Content, Co-founder & Growth Lead, Quikk API
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Dean is a creative industry professional. He specializes in the production, marketing and distribution of creative content like music, games, film, Esports and TV.
He is currently the CEO and Game Producer at Kunta Content. He has previously worked on multiple projects like video streaming deals, music and video marketing and production, video games marketing and production as well as event organisation.
Bethlehem Anteneh
Game-Thinking | Gamification Lead
Company – Goethe-Institut , EnterAfrica
Bethlehem Anteneh
Project Coordinator & Team Leader, Goethe-Institut
Game-Thinking | Gamification Lead, EnterAfrica
Location:
EnterAfrica is designed, with experts in the field of gaming and Goethe Institut, to encourage people in Sub-Saharan Africa to use Games and Game Thinking as a tool to harness everyday opportunities and address the challenges playfully.
Marlon Parker
Founder
Company – RLabs
Marlon Parker
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Marlon Parker is an Entrepreneur and advocate for using Technology for Social Good. His passion for community development has influenced his work and led to being the founder of the Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs), a global movement currently having activities in 22 countries.
RLabs have impacted more than 7.5 Million people since its inception. He has been listed as one of the 100 World Class South Africans in 2013 and 2014, an alumni of President Obama’s Young African Leaders initiative and honorary faculty member of the International School of Digital Transformation. During 2014 he was also selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Ashoka Fellow.
Dagmawi Bedilu Degefe
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
Company – Efuye Gela
Dagmawi Bedilu Degefe
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Efuye Gela
Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
A Game Thinker, a Tech & Innovation Consultant, a Community Builder, and a Serial Entrepreneur with an appetite for both Science and Arts; Dagmawi Bedilu has one vision, that is to Sell Joy in Jars and he believes the ultimate way to do so is by investing on the development of a meaning-seeking, service-centered and fully engaged youth and youth communities. He describes himself as a deep generalist (the real jack of all trades), who has made it his life purpose to see the creation of these communities.
After working as Senior Software Architect for Ethiopia’s biggest Tech Company, Dagemawi has made a 180′ career shift into the world of Games and Engagement, which he describes as the highest form of art and the perfect bridge between the humanities and science.
He and his team co-founded, set up and run various initiatives; including Chewata Awaqi (a startup that specializes in game thinking), the Ethiopian Games Associations, Efuyegela Publishers, EnterAfrica(an Afro-futuristic pan-African ecosystem building initiative by the Goethe Institut across 15 African countries), Chewatacon (the first-ever gaming festival of its kind), 100Shama (a community for nurturing the 4C of the 21st century), D5, Positive Thinkers Club, Social Game nights and PugaumeTalks.
Tim Flusk
Company – Wits Digital Arts
Tim Flusk
Game Dev & Lecturer, Wits Digital Arts
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Tim Flusk is a game developer, lecturer and researcher working at Wits Digital Arts.
Tim previously worked as a programmer in the industry but then returned to academia to delve into how games form opinions through actions, systems and technology.
He is currently researching the intersection of race and technology and the consequences for video games, as well as the psychoanalysis of games.
Alice Tokelo Seremane
Company – Vega School
Alice Tokelo Seremane
Lecturer at Vega, Game Developer and Web Developer
Location:
Jennifer Lufau
Founder
Company – AfroGameuses
Jennifer Lufau
Founder, AfroGameuses
Location: Paris, Île-de-France
She will be attending Africa Games Week with the team from Institut français.
Joni van der Leeuw
Project Manager & Product Owner
Company – Dutch Cancer Institute, Annotation Game
Joni van der Leeuw
Project Manager & Product Owner, Annotation Game, Dutch Cancer Institute
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Joni van der Leeuw will be speaking at the Games for Change Africa Festival on the gamification of digital pathology in solving the cancer puzzle.
As a cancer survivor and a game producer, Joni started working with the Dutch Cancer Institute to figure out a way to gamify pathology, and specifically the process of annotating images. His game democratises medical information and hands the tools to help out with solving the cancer problem into the hands of whoever is willing to play!
Joni is a freelance business developer and producer for indie game studios like Roost Games, Wispfire, Torpor Games, Tidbits Play. He is also the project manager / product owner in collaboration with the Dutch Cancer Institute on the Annotation Game.
Nicole Biondi
Company –
Nicole Biondi
Project Director,
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Dr Sumarie Roodt
Co-Founder & CEO, Co-Chairperson
Company – NOOSI Health, SIlicon Cape
Dr Sumarie Roodt
Co-Founder & CEO at NOOSi Health & Co-Chairperson at the Silicon Cape Initiative
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Founder & CEO of NOOSi Health (noosi.health) and thought leader, Sumarie is deeply passionate about the transformational power of technology and entrepreneurship to affect positive change in terms of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both in South Africa and Africa.
She is a Research Associate at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa (CITANDA). A National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher, she also serves on the NRF panel for Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics and ICT.
Outside of UCT, Sumarie is a Director and Co-Chairperson of the Silicon Cape Initiative, Africa’s largest, most established and most productive technology innovation network from an emerging market perspective.
Sumarie is also a Research Associate at the Sustainability Institute where she conducts advisory work on how Africa can harness technology entrepreneurship to drive the digitisation of the continent for the betterment of all.
Additionally, she serves on the BRICS working group on Science, Technology and Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship and has contributed to South Africa’s Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (PC4IR).
Sumarie has a dual specialisation in Psychology where she explores the relationship between technology and psychology. She regularly delivers keynote speeches, presents on panels and is interviewed on media channels where she advocates for using technology to transform Africa into a global leader of innovation.