Gladwell Otieno

Gladwell Wathoni Otieno chairs the Board of Trustees of the African Leadership Centre based in Nairobi and at King’s College, London. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG), a governance and anti-corruption civil society organisation based in Kenya that also works on regional governance themes. After working in the development field in organisations such as the Action for World Solidarity and the German Development Services she joined the Transparency International (TI) Secretariat in Berlin. then moved to South Africa to the Institute for Security Studies, as Head of its Africa Security Analysis Programme. She returned to Kenya to lead Transparency International-Kenya as its Executive Director at the height of the first major anti-corruption drive in Kenya’s history under the new government of President Mwai Kibaki. AfriCOG also convenes civil society governance initiatives such as the Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice, (KPTJ) coalition, which was founded to work for accountability for failed elections and the mass human rights abuses  that followed them in 2008, and has continued a focus on those issues since. She served on the board of the UNCAC Coalition – founded to promote and monitor the the Implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption and was a founding member of the first steering committee of the Open Government Partnership. She is currently a member of the board of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC), Cape Town. She studied Political Science and French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Free University of Berlin.