Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu is Founder and Managing Director of soleRebels, the world’s fastest-growing African footwear brand and the only WFTO Fair Trade footwear company in the world. She is also the Founder & Creator of Republic of Leather, a new company that is changing the way people around the world buy & love luxury leatherwear.

From the humblest of beginnings in Ethiopia, Bethlehem has built soleRebels into the first global footwear brand ever to emerge from a developing nation. She has created world-class jobs and empowered her community and country, while presenting a galvanized, dynamic face of African creativity to the global market. soleRebels has expanded rapidly and today exports to 45 countries; the brand is targeting 50 stand-alone retail stores across the US by 2019 and 500 worldwide by 2022.

Bethlehem’s achievements in building her businesses have brought wide global acclaim. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and the first female African entrepreneur to address the Clinton Global Initiative. She was named Outstanding African Business Woman by African Business Awards in 2011, listed in Forbes Magazine as one of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women to Watch, and Business Insider ranked her one of The Top 5 Entrepreneurs in Africa. CNN recently named Bethlehem one of the 12 greatest female entrepreneurs of the last century, alongside Coco Chanel and Sara Blakely for her ground-breaking influence.

Mark Essien is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria-based Hotels.ng, an online hotel booking agency which is the first and largest of its kind in Nigeria.

As Nigeria begins to actively diversify its economy from an oil-based one, tourism has emerged as a promising sector, contributing 3.2% of Nigeria’s GDP in 2014, a figure that is expected to double by 2024. Hotels.ng continues to maintain its position as the largest market share holder in the Nigerian hotel booking sector, and is in the process of expanding across the rest of Africa.

Since establishing Hotels.ng in 2013, Mark has overseen the growth of hotel listings on the platform from just over 100 at launch to over 7,000 hotels in 21 regions of Nigeria, with millions of transactions in 2014 alone.

Mark was born in Nigeria and holds a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng), Computer Hardware Engineering, from Beuth Hochschule in Berlin, Germany. He also holds an MSc degree in Computer Science from Freie Universität, also in Berlin.

Tim Sebastian is the chairman of The New Arab Debates, currently broadcast and distributed worldwide on Deutsche Welle TV. The award-winning former BBC foreign correspondent was the first presenter of HARDtalk, BBC World’s daily half-hour interview programme, where he worked for more than seven years.

Tim was the founder and chairman of The Doha Debates, which were broadcast across the globe on BBC World News from 2004 until 2012. The programmes, recorded in Qatar, provided a unique, uncensored forum for discussing the most controversial issues in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

In 2012 he presented the Outsider Debates, recorded in India and screened on Bloomberg TV.

In 1982, Tim was the winner of the Richard Dimbleby Award at BAFTA and was also named Television Journalist of the Year by the Royal Television Society. For two years running, in 2000 and 2001, he received the Royal Television Society’s Interviewer of the Year Award.

His began his career as a foreign correspondent in Warsaw, covering the Solidarity revolution, before becoming the BBC’s Europe Correspondent in 1982 and Moscow Correspondent in 1984. A year later he was expelled by the Soviet authorities and sent to Washington until 1989.

Born in London in 1952, Tim speaks Russian and German fluently and also holds a BA Honours degree in modern languages from Oxford University. A best-selling author, he has written eight novels and two non-fiction books.