The Founder and Executive Director of ACCORD, Vasu Gounden, was invited to attend the International Advisory Board Meeting for the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO), which was held in Scheveningen, The Netherlands from the 21st to the 24th of June 2009. Mr. Gounden was appointed to the ICCO board in late 2008 after attending their regional meeting that was held in Madagascar and which aimed to investigate how to implement their new innovation process in the Southern Africa region.
While in The Netherlands Mr. Gounden had a series of meetings with various representatives from the Africa desks at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2007 Mr. Gounden was invited by the Dutch United Nations Student Association Utrecht (DUNSA-Utrecht) to be the Keynote speaker at their conference on international conflicts entitled “A Struggle for Peace”. He was also invited by the National Committee for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (NCDO) to be a resource person at the Dutch Africa Day, presenting the keynote address in the workshop on “African Solutions to African Conflicts”. In 2008 Mr. Gounden was one of two speakers from the South invited to be a resource person at the “Ontwikkeling is Verandering” (Development is Change): Dialogue about the Future Conference hosted by the Royal Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). This meeting was part of the interactive dialogue process started by the MFA with Dutch civil society organisations about the future of the Dutch co-financing system.
