Tawanda Mutasah

Tawanda Mutasah is International Director of Programs at the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York, and was formerly Chair of OSI's Africa Advisory Board[1]. He previously directed the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (from 2003-08), and, among other pre-OSI roles, served on Oxfam GB's international advocacy staff.

In Zimbabwe, he was founding chair of the National Constitutional Assembly - a prodemocracy coalition of over 200 national civic organizations (c.f. Zimbabwe Parliament 18 September 2007, Hansard [2] and [3]. He also worked as head of the ecumenical justice and peace commission in the country. In the early 1990s, Mutasah was a young national leader who experienced various episodes of Mugabe's retribution against Zimbabwe's pioneering civic activism, suffering persecution as a national student leader and then as a human rights defender and pro-democracy organizer.

He serves on many African and international boards, including as chair of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM), and as a founding trustee of the Southern Africa Litigation Cent re[4] (SALC).

Mutasah was admitted to the Zimbabwe bar in 1995 and is a recipient of the International Bar Association's annual International Rule of Law Award[5] and several academic awards. He holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as Harvard Law School and the University of Zimbabwe.