Andrea Barschdorf-Hager has led CARE Austria since 2009. Her commitment to development cooperation began during her studies in Ethnology and African Studies at the University of Vienna and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). She is an International Gender Champion, Chair of the Humanitarian Governance Group of CARE International (HGG), Vice-Chair of the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR), and Principal at the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) of the UN. She is also a board member of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP). Since 2021, she has been hosting the weekly podcast „CARE in Action“. Andrea has received multiple awards for her longstanding commitment.

With a particular focus on AI and digitalization, she is a member of the AI Advisory Board of CARE USA as well as a longstanding jury member of the STARTS Prize Africa in cooperation with Ars Electronica. From this collaboration, the initiative „AI for Social Impact“ was born in 2026. CARE Austria and Ars Electronica are awarding this prize for the first time for international projects that demonstrate how Artificial Intelligence can be concretely used for social progress, sustainability and poverty reduction.

Apollo B. Gabazira is a dynamic, innovative leader with over 17 years of experience in international organizations. He has held senior roles including Regional CEO at Aga Khan Education Services (East Africa), CEO at Aga Khan Education Service Kenya, and Country Director at Build Africa. Apollo has extensive experience with CARE International, serving as Country Director in Rwanda and Uganda, and Assistant Country Director in Tanzania and Uganda. He rejoined CARE International Uganda as Country Director in December 2019. His expertise includes strategic planning, capacity building, organizational transformation, operational efficiency, and business growth – helping organizations reduce waste and achieve their goals.

Tune in to the ”CARE in Action”-Podcast episode #149 with Apollo: https://care.at/home/podcast/#gabazira

Vivian Thabet started her career in development in 1992 and she has since gained 32 years of experience in the field. Her extensive experience includes working with notable organizations such as CRS, CEOSS, EQI, and CARE International. She has a balanced mix of technical programmatic expertise and leadership skills. Her journey with CARE began in May 2007 as a Project Manager. She played a crucial role in establishing and leading the Women’s Rights program, eventually becoming the Deputy Country Director. During the transition from CARE International to CARE Egypt, she was instrumental as a board member and later joined the executive structure in 2022. Vivian brings with her a wealth of experience and a proven track record of leadership in the development sector. Her deep commitment to social justice and her extensive expertise in program management and strategic planning make her an ideal fit for this role.

Turn into the ”CARE in Action”-Podcast episode #135 with Vivian: https://care.at/home/podcast/#thabet

Ian Vale is leading CARE’s global network of country offices to deliver impact against the organization’s five-year strategy. He is based in Nairobi, Kenya. He oversees global humanitarian and program operations, driving innovation, operational excellence, and collaboration worldwide. With 25+ years of leadership experience, Ian previously served as Regional Director for East and Southern Africa at Save the Children International, where he also led global strategy development. Earlier, he held senior roles with International Medical Corps across Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Africa, the US, and the UK. He later worked as a management consultant and executive coach, specializing in strategy, leadership, and organizational change for NGOs and civil society organizations. Known for his collaborative, people-centred leadership style,  Ian brings deep expertise in strategy, organizational change, and program operations – helping international organizations navigate complexity and maximize impact.

Turn into the ”CARE in Action”-Podcast episode #125 with Ian: https://care.at/home/podcast/#vale

Bastiaan van Ommen leads initiatives that help translate emerging technologies into practical organisational value, with a particular focus on responsible AI, workflow automation, digital governance, and organisational capability building.

He is currently involved in shaping CARE Nederland’s Digital Readiness agenda, including Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption, AI governance and policy development, workflow automation, and the modernisation of project and information management systems. His work centres on building the systems, capabilities, and governance needed to realise the benefits of AI and digital transformation in a responsible and sustainable way.

Julieta Gonzales has over 15 years of experience working in the civil society sector in Brussels, both in global and EU decision making processes. She has been elected as a member of the Board of CONCORD Europe in June 2025 and has co-led their Gender Equality Group, where she provided strategic direction to the network’s advocacy work to advance gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights in the EU’s external action. She has previously worked for the European networks CONCORD Europe, ACT Alliance and Plan International, where she engaged with diverse coalitions, movements and human rights defenders.

She has in-depth knowledge of and has advocated on issues such as CSO development effectiveness and shrinking civil society space; EU-Africa and Latin America and Caribbean relations; gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights, among others. More recently, she has influenced the EU budget 2021-2027, helping ensure it is aligned with CSO priorities and enabling further funding opportunities. Also, she has supported local and national civil society actors to engage in advocacy with donors and to develop advocacy strategies to influence the EU. Julieta is Argentinean and specialized in human rights and EU external policies.

Milagros Miceli

is a sociologist and computer scientist originally from Argentina, now based in Berlin. She completed her doctorate at TU Berlin’s Chair of Internet and Society in 2022, focusing on the unjust treatment of the people who produce data for AI systems. She has been researching in TU Berlin’s Internet and Society division since 2018.

She currently holds three roles simultaneously:

• Research Lead at the DAIR Institute (the Distributed AI Research Institute, founded by Dr. Timnit Gebru)
• Head of the „Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics“ research unit at the Weizenbaum Institute
• Lecturerat TU Berlin

In 2025, she was named to TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI – notably as one of the few honorees recognized not for building AI technology, but for exposing its human and ethical costs. On her own website, she describes herself, alongside her academic titles, as „a mom, an immigrant, and a first-generation college graduate.“

What She Works On
Miceli’s research centers on how the „ground-truth“ data behind machine learning is produced, and
on the labor conditions, power dynamics, and human costs hidden behind that process. She and her colleagues coined the term „data work“ as a more accurate alternative to labels like „microwork,“ „click work,“ or „ghost work“ – terms she argues make invisible, low-paid, high-volume labor sound smaller and less serious than it is. Her research combines ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and participatory methods with the data annotators, labelers, and content moderators – many based in the Global South – whose labor underlies today’s AI systems. Her early landmark study, “Between Subjectivity and Imposition: Power Dynamics in Data Annotation for Computer Vision”, examined how Argentinian and Venezuelan annotation workers experience the process of labeling image data for computer vision systems – surfacing how much subjective judgment and power imbalance is baked into data that AI treats as objective fact.

The Data Workers‘ Inquiry
Her best-known initiative is the Data Workers‘ Inquiry, a joint project of the Weizenbaum Institute, TU Berlin, and DAIR. Rather than researching data workers as subjects, Miceli trains them and pays them – at the same €35/hour rate as any academic researcher – to research and publish their own findings, in whatever form suits them: essays, podcasts, comics, zines, documentaries. The first cohort spanned Kenya, Syria, Brazil, and Germany. The approach has surfaced findings Miceli says she „would have needed thousands of interviews to maybe approach“ through conventional research alone – including the prevalence of gender-based violence among data workers. She has described the project not as offering clean answers, but as „a messy, stubborn attempt to put research in the hands of the people living the realities researchers usually write about.“

What to Expect
Miceli speaks with the authority of both a rigorous academic and someone who has spent years in direct, on-the-ground contact with the people her research concerns. Expect a talk that is empirically grounded, human-centered, and quietly urgent rather than combative – she tends to let workers‘ own testimony carry the argument. Her core provocation for any audience working in technology, development, or AI: behind every „automated“ or „intelligent“ system is real, often precarious human labor, disproportionately based in the Global South – and the ethical stakes of AI cannot be separated from the working conditions of the people who built its data foundations. Participants should expect to leave with a sharper, more concrete sense of AI’s human supply chain, not just its algorithms.