Bio
Aly Verjee is senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute and contributing author at CIGI’s SSR Resource Centre. He is the author of the report Race Against Time: Countdown to the Referenda in Southern Sudan and Abyei. Most recently, he served as principal political analyst for the European Union observation mission for the Southern Sudan referendum.
Aly has served as an adviser to groups, agencies and governments. From 2008 to 2010, he represented the Carter Center as deputy director of the first long-term international political and electoral observation mission to Sudan. From 2006 to 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.
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 the last six years, he has helped raise more than US$10 million in donor grants. As a feature writer, he has undertaken assignments in Kenya, South Africa, Botswana and Ghana.
Aly is an accomplished public speaker and has also served as a media commentator for Al Jazeera, Agence France Press, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, the BBC, the CBC, CNN, Deutsche Welle, The Economist, Financial Times, IRIN, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Reuters, the South African Broadcasting Corporation and Tokyo Chunichi.