Chad's Oil—Miracle or Mirage?

Dobian Assingar is a civil society member of Chad's petroleum revenue oversight committee. He is president of the Chadian League for Human Rights, vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, and editor-in-chief of FM Liberté, an independent radio station in Chad.

Ian Gary was Strategic Issues Advisor for Africa in the Policy and Advocacy Department at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) headquarters in Baltimore until the end of 2004, at which time he became Strategic Issues Advisor–Extractive Industries with a global portfolio. CRS is the official international relief and development agency of the U.S. Catholic community, with 99 field offices around the world and an annual budget of $500 million.

Gary is lead staff person for the CRS Extractive Industries in Africa Initiative, a four-year-old research and advocacy program linking field staff, project support and international advocacy. CRS supports church and local civil society projects addressing extractive industries in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, and Sierra Leone. The growing global portfolio of CRS supported projects addressing extractive industries now includes Peru and Azerbaijan.

Ian is co-author, with Terry Lynn Karl of Stanford University, of the CRS report Bottom of the Barrel: Africa's Oil Boom and the Poor, released in June 2003. The report has been downloaded over 100,000 times, translated into French and Portuguese, and covered by international media outlets.

Gary is a frequent commentator on African oil issues in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Le Figaro, National Geographic, National Public Radio, BBC, Voice of America, Radio France International, and oil industry publications. He has given presentations at the World Bank, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Corporate Council on Africa, the African Studies Association, the African Center for Strategic Studies, and Harvard University, among other venues. Gary was a member of the African Energy Task Force at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has lived in Ghana and Zimbabwe and has conducted field research on oil-related issues in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, and Angola. He holds a M.A. degree from the University of Leeds in the Politics of International Resources and Development.

Nikki Reisch is Africa Program Coordinator at the Bank Information Center (BIC), an indepedent, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization in Washington, DC. BIC partners with civil society actors in developing and transition countries to influence the World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) to promote social and economic justice and ecological sustainability. In addition to monitoring oil developments in Chad, Reisch has followed issues related to energy, natural-resource exploitation, and IFIs in Africa for the past two years.