Mamadou Mactar Diallo is Head of Marketing, Communication, and Innovation at RAES. A 360-degree marketing and communications strategist with over 10 years of experience, Diallo leverages his background in advertising to analyze and interpret consumer data, pursue targeted digital media buying, and use data to optimize communication. Career highlights include: supporting the #JigeenJangal campaign, a social engagement initiative focused on girls’ education, which won the 2020 Pitcher Awards’ Grand Prix; and spearheading the launch of a Pepsi campaign in Senegal, which won the 2023 Cristal Festival Maroc’s Cristal Award for Storytelling. Diallo shares his passion for digital innovation, influencer marketing, and brand awareness in various ways. He is co-founder of Galsen CM, an initiative designed to unite Senegal’s community managers around best practices and innovations. He is also an educator across multiple learning communities (e.g., Force-N program at the Université Virtuelle du Sénégal). To date, Diallo has published over 70 articles and case studies that examine digital marketing. Diallo holds multiple certificates in marketing (HubSpot Academy, Hootsuite University, Coorp Academy, Google pour les pros) and a bachelor’s degree in economics and business (Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal).

Rabiatou Sangaré is Program Director at RAES. For the past decade, Sangaré has worked with local and international humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to expand women’s and young people’s access to health, education, and civic opportunities. She specializes in designing, planning, and implementing strategically-aligned projects as well as conducting rigorous evaluation and analysis to discover best practices. Prior to this role, in which she oversees RAES’s programs across the health, gender equality, civic participation, and environmental spaces, Sangaré was head of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research at RAES. In that capacity, she coordinated all research around RAES’s flagship “C’est la Vie!” program. This comprised both ongoing evaluation of effectiveness as well as innovative experimental research, pursued in partnership with University of California – Los Angeles and Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal. An accomplished biostatistician, Sangaré has co-authored several scientific articles published by health science journals. Sangaré holds a master’s degree in economic and financial statistical modeling (University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, France) and a bachelor’s degree in economics with a focus on health research (University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne, France).

Marianne Paulot is the Writing Director of RAES, an innovative non-governmental organization of which she is a founding member. Paulot found her calling — to facilitate social change via media — in 1993 when she supported an innovative, participatory French campaign that produced 35 TV programs that aimed to raise HIV awareness. In 2004, she developed and tested various participatory edutainment projects that utilized the skills of young writers, bloggers, and photographers to portray their communities, including: Pitch et Coumi; Lengoo Rek; and Sunukaddu. In 2017, Paulot joined the C’est la Vie! (CLV) team. She co-wrote all 25 episodes of CLV Season Four and, in 2023, 71 episodes of the CLV webseries. Paulot developed the CLV spin off “1515 Ratanga” and the radio adaptation of CLV Season Two. Paulot also created Chad’s “Au pays des Sao” with Chadian bloggers, the podcast “POSITIFS!” with young Senegalese PVVIH (people living with HIV), and the Malian TV series “An Kan Lamaga” with Malian artists. Paulot has served as a consultant for UNESCO, creating training modules on gender transformative approaches in the context of HIV awareness in West Africa. In recognition of her impactful work, Paulot was awarded the medal of Paris City. Additionally, Paulot has been featured in the Huffington Post and published two novels with Belfond Publishers, “L’Envolée” and “La Bouche d’Ombre,” both of which have been translated into German, Italian, and Japanese. Paulot holds a master’s degree in English literature and a bachelor’s degree in French literature.

Samir Nava is the Social and Behavior Change (SBC) Specialist at RAES, a Senegalese non-governmental organization known for its use of the SBC approach commonly referred to as edutainment. For the past 20 years, Nava has advised edutainment projects in the public health and environmental conservation sectors. He began his career with the Radio ADO project at the University of Guadalajara. During Nava’s tenure, Radio ADO’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH) programming reached a majority of adolescents in Morelia, Mexico, and significantly impacted their SRH knowledge and intentions to use contraception. In recognition of this community leadership, the Mexican government awarded Radio ADO with The National Prize of Youth—Honorable Mention in 2006. Nava also leveraged his edutainment expertise to affect knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors among Latin Americans living in watershed communities. He supported SBC campaigns that reached 12 Latin American countries, and wrote three radio soap operas that were broadcast in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Nava holds a master’s degree in anthropology for development (Aix-Marseille University, France) and a bachelor’s degree in communication (Universidad Latina de América, Mexico).

Laurel Felt is the Managing Director of OASIS, an African research-and-action hub that seeks to enrich socially impactful storytelling in Africa and beyond. Felt has worked at the intersection of media impact research and impactful mediamaking for the past 15+ years. As a qualitative researcher with the USC Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project, Felt studied cultural and media landscapes in sub-Saharan Africa and crafted recommendations for socially impactful storytelling around sensitive public health topics. She also co-authored Lights, Camera, Impact (2023), a landmark report that reviewed entertainment impact research and offered insights to the burgeoning field of narrative change. With the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers, Felt consulted for such organizations as Disney and Futures Without Violence, as well as designed, wrote, and starred in multimedia EE vehicle The Barbie Dream Gap Project Curriculum, found to impact young audience members’ knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. She is the former executive director of the Student Voice Project and a long-serving faculty member of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Felt first worked for RAES in 2010, leading conceptualization of “the Sunukaddu method,” a pedagogical approach that RAES applied across nine African countries and which the French Development Agency (AFD) recognized as “emblematic.” Felt holds a doctoral degree in communication (University of Southern California, USA), a master’s degree in child development (Tufts University, USA), and a bachelor’s degree in social policy (Northwestern University, USA).