Mr. Mouhamadou Ngouda Mboup is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Autonomous Port of Dakar in Senegal. He is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Public Law at the Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. He is also the Secretary General of the Circle of Public Administrators, a member of the Public Law Consulting and Litigation Firm AVEX Conseils and the Chairman of the High Regulatory Authority of the PASTEF-LES PATRIOTES Party.

From 2011 to 2024, he was the Chair of the Scientific Committee of the Tink Tank Afrikajom Center. Between 2016 and 2019, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Human Rights and Peace at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. Before, he was also a Temporary Teaching and Research Associate at the Faculty of Law and Management at the University of La Rochelle in France and a teacher-researcher at the Faculty of Legal Sciences at the University of Grenoble-Alpes in France.

He is a lawyer, expert, specialist in public law, public governance, public litigation, and public business law.

Dr. Steve MacFeely is the Chief Statistician of the OECD and Director of the Statistics and Data Directorate. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Economics at University College Cork in Ireland. He chairs the Advisory Board of the Statistical Journal of the IAOS, the UN’s Productive Capacity Index Statistical and Technical Expert Group, and the Advisory Board of the International Statistics Literacy Project. Steve is an elected member of the International Statistics Institute. Prior to joining the OECD, Steve served as the Director of Data and Analytics at the World Health Organization.He also served as Director of the UNCTAD Statistics, where he played a key role in the development of TiSSTAT.

Before joining the UN, he was the Deputy Director-General at the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland.
 

Sheldon L.A. Mc Lean is the Coordinator of the Economic Development Unit at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN ECLAC), based at the Sub-Regional Headquarters in Port-of-Spain which has responsibility for 25 Caribbean countries.

Mr. Mc Lean has previously served as Regional Trade Policy Advisor at the Caribbean Community Secretariat. He has over 20 years of experience in the areas of trade and trade-related development policies; structural transformation and economic diversification.

He has authored numerous research papers on current and emerging trade and development issues for small economies, including de-risking, regional integration, public debt, tourism diversification and climate finance.

Mr. Mc Lean is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, having earned both a BSc. Agricultural Economics and MSc. Agricultural Economics, specializing in Policy Development, from that institution.

Mardi McBrien is Director Strategic Affairs at the IFRS Foundation where she is currently playing an active role in setting up the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Prior to the IFRS Foundation, Mardi spent over a decade leading the global ESG standard setter, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB). She is a trustee of one of the oldest environmental NGOs, the International Tree Foundation, a founding Board member of WOCAN – Women Organising for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management / W+ Standard, a former member of the UK Financial Reporting Council Advisory Panel, a school governor and a member of the ICAEW Sustainability Advisory Committee. In 2021 Mardi was selected as one of the ESG Foundation’s ones to watch.

Julie McCarthy is currently co-CEO of NatureFinance. Prior to NatureFinance, McCarthy was founding co-director of the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Economic Justice Program, a $100 million per annum global grantmaking and impact investment program focused on issues of fiscal justice, workers’ rights, and corporate governance. 

Previous roles include serving as the founding director of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and as a Franklin Fellow and peacebuilding adviser at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, focused on Liberia. Prior to this, McCarthy co-founded the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), serving as its deputy director until 2009. She is a Brookings non-resident fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development, and an Aspen Civil Society Fellow.

Mr. Bernard McCaul has been leading GOAL’s programmes in the Latin America and Caribbean Region for over 15 years.

Fluent in Spanish, Bernard led the transformation and growth of GOAL’s programme in the LAC region which under his direction now includes major regional programmes such as the Resilience of the Blue Economy which aims to protect the livelihoods and way of life of indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, the Resilient and Inclusive Neighbourhood approach which is being implemented in eight cities in the region and Humanitarian Leadership through which GOAL is responding to major crises such as the ongoing Venezuelan Migrant Crisis, Haiti Earthquake Response and others.

Bernard was the driving force behind the establishment of GOAL’s Programme Innovation LAB and led the development of the Resilience for Social Systems Approach and Analysis of Resilience of Communities to Disaster Toolkit which have been acclaimed in the sector.  Bernard was one of the architects of GOAL’s new strategic focus, From Crisis to Resilience, which sets out a vision for overcoming humanitarian crisis.

The LAC Region comprises 33 countries and has a population of 652 million. The Region is considered one of the most vulnerable in the world to disasters, due to natural and man-made threats and comprises some of the most unequal countries in the world (according to the World Economic Forum GINI Index). 80% of the population live in urban areas in 2021 which has accelerated over the last 10+years due to climate changes, conflict and the increase rural to urban migration.

Bernard is originally from Cork, Ireland and began his career as a consulting engineering delivering large public/private partnerships in water services.

Dr. Niall McDonough originally trained as a marine biologist with research interests in marine aquaculture, shellfish stock restoration and marine resource management. He holds a first class BA Mod. in Zoology from Trinity College Dublin (1993) and a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast (1998).

Following two years at the Environmental Change Institute at National University Ireland, Galway, Niall served for five years as General Manager of the Centre for Marine Resources and Mariculture (C-Mar), an innovation centre at Queen’s University Belfast providing research, technical and advisory services for the emerging marine aquaculture sector. From 2007 to 2009 he worked with the Marine Institute’s international cooperation programme. In 2009, he was appointed Executive Director of the European Marine Board (EMB), a European marine science policy organisation based at the InnovOcean campus in Ostend, Belgium. He returned to Ireland in 2017 to take up his current role with the Marine Institute.

As Director of PIRS, Niall oversees a team and programme of work that plays a key role in supporting and promoting marine research and innovation at national and international level. He coordinates the implementation of Ireland’s Marine Research and Innovation Strategy (2017-2022) and chairs the national Marine Research Funders’ Forum. He oversees the Marine Institute’s circa €7m per annum external research funding programme and is a member of the Irish Government’s Innovation 2020 Implementation Group and Horizon Europe High-Level Group. In November 2020, he was elected Chair of the European Joint Programming Initiative on Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans.
 

Ashma McDougall is a Senior Lecturer of Economics at the Dominica State College and an independent Business Consultant having worked with UNESCO and the World Bank projects, government funded initiatives to include a few.

Ashma is currently the President of the National Youth Council of Dominica and a Reader in International Development. She holds a B.A. degree in Economics, Bachelor of Science degree in Finance with a minor in Political Science from Bemidji State University in Minnesota and the M.A. in Economic Policy from the George Washington University.

She has been active in the area of developmental research of SIDs for the last four (4) years and has been a frequent contributor to the mentorship of entrepreneurs and small business owners in Dominica. Her current doctoral research involves the study of culture and poverty within the Kalinago Territory analyzing the dissonance of culture across indigenous generations and its impact of poverty in the Kalinago Territory; understanding the scope of the survival of the Kalinago heritage in the coming decades.

Ashma is currently focused on youth development in Dominica and a greater scope in the region as an advocate for youth development through empowerment, engagement and increased involvement in decision making.

Brian is a Partner in BDO Ireland, specialising in two areas, corporate restructuring and healthcare consulting. Brian first joined BDO in 1995 and became a Partner in the firm in 2002. In 2003, Brian was one of the founding partners of a new office of Crowe Horwath and, in 2012, this office of Crowe Horwath merged again with BDO. Brian graduated with ACCA in 1993, becoming a member in 1998 and a Fellow in 2003. He became actively involved in the local centre of ACCA in 1997 and has since been involved in local centre, Munster district network and Irish Region ACCA activities. Brian was a member of the International Assembly for three years and he was elected to Council in 2006. Brian has been active on a number of standing committees down through the years, and has in particular focussed on the areas of Governance, where he was chair of Governance Committee, Chair of the Governance Design Task Force and then Chair of the newly formed Governance Design Committee. Brian is a non-executive director of Ireland’s ‘bad bank’, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) and is non-executive Chairman of Ireland’s health and social care regulator, the Health Information & Quality Authority (HIQA).