Prof. Ruth Stewart is the Director of the Alliance for Living Evidence (Alive) at the Future Evidence Foundation. As Director of Alive she builds collaborative living evidence partnerships for meaningful impact. Having grown up in Malawi, she studied in the UK, and lives and works in South Africa. Her career has focused on developing approaches for producing useful, policy-relevant evidence for decision-makers. Her focus is on facilitating systems-level change, and supporting others to do so, with an emphasis on evidence-policy partnerships as a mechanism for change. Previously she has led teams supporting significant evidence-to-policy systems-developments within South African policy processes. She has largely pioneered the idea of evidence networks, and formed the cross-sector, transdisciplinary Africa Evidence Network in 2012. The Network now includes 6000 people from across government, academia, business and more. You can read more about her work with Alive here 

Ekwaro A. Obuku is a Uganda Medical Doctor and served as a co-founder member of the Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation (www.chs.mak.ac.ug/afcen/about-us) and the Uganda Clearing House for Health Policy and Systems Research (https://uch.cengkuru.com/) both situated at the College of Health Sciences, Makerere University, Uganda. Ekwaro completed his doctoral studies about research to policy at Makerere University, Uganda and McMaster University, Canada. Ekwaro  has been involved in efforts to link research to policy including skills transfer for evidence synthesis across Africa for over 15 years and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.