Aly Verjee is senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute. A specialist in contemporary East African politics, he directed the Rift Valley Institute’s 2012 Great Lakes Course on the history and politics of Burundi, Rwanda and DR Congo; served as director of the international election observation mission to Djibouti (2011); principal political analyst for the European Union observation mission for the Southern Sudan referendum (2010-11); and deputy director of the Carter Center’s international political and electoral observation mission to Sudan (2008-10).
From 2006-2008, he helped manage the logistics of Southern Sudan refugee repatriation operations from the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Kenya. Earlier in 2006, Verjee managed the first ever election observer network established in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with some 7,000 Congolese observers. He assisted in the establishment of Southern Sudan's first independent newspaper, the Juba Post, and was a visiting lecturer in ethics and English at the School of Medicine of the Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan. In 2005, 2010 and 2012, he advised and helped manage international election observation missions in Somaliland. As a feature writer, he has undertaken assignments in Kenya, South Africa, Botswana and Ghana. Verjee has also worked in Afghanistan, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti and Senegal.
Publications include New North, Old North: The Republic of Sudan after the split (chapter) in Sudan after Separation: New Approaches to a New Region, Heinrich Boll Foundation (2012); Disputed Votes, Deficient Observation: the May 2011 election in South Kordofan, Sudan (2011) and Race Against Time: Countdown to the Referenda in Southern Sudan and Abyei (2010).
(Twitter: @alyverjee)
