Peter Buckley, Investment Banker

After a degree in Accounting and Finance, Peter Buckley has worked for two Investment Banks, SG Warburg and Deutsche Bank. He is currently responsible for a European team that provides equity and private equity advice to smaller institutions and high net worth individuals.
There is a desire amongst many Corporates and individuals to support the children of Afghanistan, and he believes that the particularly focussed aims and financial efficiency of this charity will distinguish it from many others.

Sarah Katherine Fane MBChB

Inspired by a gap year working in rural India, Sarah Fane decided to switch from her degree course in French and Latin to study medicine at Bristol University. Her elective was spent in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where she met with the Guildford Surgical Team. She returned with them the following year to Pakistan, and worked from a Mujahideen border camp, seeing female patients from the surrounding refugee camps.
Ten years later, having married, had four children, and done various in hospital jobs between children, she was asked to go to the Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan, to assess a mother and child clinic. The visit and the people she met inspired her to set up this charity.

Rebecca Constable

Rebecca joined Societe Generale Private Banking Hambros in September 2009, as a Senior Private Banker having spent 20 years advising private clients, charities and trusts at Barclays and Kleinwort Benson. She graduated from Bristol University in 1988, and is a Fellow of the Securities Institute and a Member of the Institute of Directors. She was chair of the Wealth for Women initiative at Barclays Wealth, focussing on philanthropy. She is an active supporter of Opportunity International a charity which provides micro loans, business support and banking facilities to women predominantly in Africa and is focussing her support on charities assisting women and children’s education.

William Reeve, Journalist

For 24 years, William Reeve was a foreign correspondent, editor and journalist with the BBC World Service.  For several years he was the BBC Afghanistan Correspondent.  In February 2002, he set up and managed the first training course for Afghan journalists, subsequently training nearly 300 Afghan journalists.  Since then, he has designed and managed five media/ communications projects for the Afghan Government, including the setting up of the initial Afghan Government Counter Narcotics Communications Programme under contract with the UK FCO.  More recently he was the Strategic Communications Adviser with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Basra, Iraq, a project funded by DFID.  For his coverage of the Taleban’s fall from Kabul in 2001, William won several major international broadcasting prizes for the BBC, notably an EMMY Award, a Royal Television Society Award, the main Sony Radio Award of the year, and nomination for a BAFTA Award.   He founded Reeve Communications Ltd in August 2006.   

Clive Anderson

Clive Anderson has been our host at 6 Literary Lunch Events which raised a total of 120,000 since 2002. A former barrister, he is now famous for being a successful comedy writer as well as a radio and television presenter in the United Kingdom. Winner of a British Comedy Award in 1991[1], Anderson began his success during his 15-year law career with stand-up comedy and comedic script writing, before starring in Whose Line Is It Anyway? on BBC Radio 4. He was also successful with a number of radio programmes, television interviews and guest appearances on Have I Got News For You and QI.[2] He recently presented “Maestro” and The Last Night of The Proms.

Colin Peter Jardine Brown FRCS FRCOG, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist

Professionally, Colin Jardine Brown has worked as a generalist in both branches of the specialty, with particular interests in labour ward management, gynaecological oncology and colposcopy. In the last ten years, he has been involved in improving postgraduate medical education and the quality of teaching within the profession. He is keen to see isolated doctors within developing countries have access to keeping sensibly up to date and the wherewithal to practice safe, affordable medicine and surgery

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is the first non-American journalist to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award and the youngest recipient of the One World Media broadcast journalist of the year award in the United Kingdom.

In the last seven years she has produced and reported on 13 films for major networks in the United States and Britain including CNN, PBS, Channel 4 (U.K.) and the Discovery channel. Her work has earned her major awards in broadcast journalism including the Overseas Press Club Award, The American women and Radio and Television award, The Cine Golden Eagle Award, The Banff TV Rockie award and the South Asian Journalist Award.

Sharmeen’s work has taken her to over ten countries around the world. Her career in documentary filmmaking began when she examined the plight of Afghani refugee children in Pakistan for one of her articles. Their situation was so dire, and their stories so compelling, that Sharmeen decided to return to Pakistan and create a film about them. She petitioned Smith College and New York Times Television production division for the grants that would allow her to accomplish her goals. Intrigued by her story, both organizations gave her the funds as well as production equipment and training.

Born in Karachi, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was the first woman in her Pakistani family to receive a Western education. Obaid graduated from Smith College with a bachelor of arts in economics and government and then went to complete two master’s degrees from Stanford University in International Policy Studies and Communication. 

Professor R J Heald OBE MChir FRCS, Surgical Director of The Pelican Centre

Bill Heald has a personal chair at the University of Southampton. He is Director of the Pelican Centre and Colorectal Research Unit at the North Hampshire Hospital.

His main interest for the past 20 years has been the research and development of the Total Mesorectal Excision (TME) technique for rectal cancer. He is a former Vice-President and currently a Member of Council and Director of International Affairs at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He is past-President of the Section of Coloproctology at the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Association of Coloproctology. He has recently received honorary degrees or professorships in Sweden, Holland, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. During 2001 he has received The Gold Medal of the Society of Surgery of the Netherlands and in July the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Association of Coloproctologists of Great Britain and Ireland.

He remains essentially a practical operating surgeon with a primary interest in the detail of the surgery of colorectal cancer.


Sophia Bergqvist MBA, Managing Director, Quinta de la Rosa

In 1988 Sophia Bergqvist set up a company, Quinta de la Rosa, producing port and wine from the family vineyard in Northern Portugal. Prior to this, she spent fifteen years working for the strategic management consultants, Booz.Allen & Hamilton in London, Paris and Lisbon as a Principal responsible for marketing and media.
She has always been particularly interested in education and economic development having studied Geography at Cambridge University. She is a Governor of a secondary school, Fitzharrys, in Abingdon and sits on the Council at the University of Buckingham. She has become moved by the plight of the Afghanis and strongly believes that we have a responsibility to help them since our involvement in the country post September 11th.

As a patron, she hopes to bring her entrepreneurial, business and marketing skills to Afghan Connection.

Sir David Manning GCMG CVO

Educated at Ardingly College, Oriel College, Oxford, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, Manning began his career as a civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1972. He has served in embassies in Poland, India, Paris, and Moscow, and within the FCO he has worked on the Central American desk, the Russian desk and held several senior positions. He has represented the UK in Brussels and also at the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia in 1994.

Between 1995 and 1998, he was British ambassador to Israel; from 2001, he was a foreign policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. During this time he developed a close relationship with his counterpart, then US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Blair selected him to replace Christopher Meyer as the British Ambassador to the United States. Manning took up the post in 2003. Ambassador Manning visited numerous states, as well as the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, during his term as Ambassador to the United States and was instrumental in planning Queen Elizabeth's most recent visit to her thirteen former colonies.

He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG) in the 2008 New Year Honours. 

Christina Lamb

Christina Lamb has been reporting on Afghanistan for more than two decades since an unexpected wedding invitation shortly after graduating from Oxford, resulted in her travelling with the mujaheddin fighting the Soviet occupation. She was just 21 and spent the next two years living in Peshawar, celebrating her 22nd birthday by driving a rickshaw round the Storytellers’ Bazaar. Since then Christina has reported from all over the world, becoming one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and winning numerous awards.

Currently Foreign Affairs Correspondent for The Sunday Times, she has won four British Press Awards, three What the Papers Say Awards and two Foreign Press Association awards.

She has covered wars from Iraq to the Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battlefield; interviewed military dictators such as General Pinochet and heroes such as Nelson Mandela; accompanied Princess Diana to war-torn Angola; danced in the Rio Carnival; been named an enemy of the state by Robert Mugabe and lived on a fattening farm in southern Nigeria. In 2006 she narrowly escaped with her life from a Taliban ambush of British troops in Helmand and in 2007 she was on Benazir Bhutto’s bus when it was bombed.

Her books include the best-selling The Africa House; House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe; Waiting For Allah – Pakistan’s struggle for democracy; The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years  and Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands.

Christina is married to a Portuguese football writer who she met when they were both Nieman Fellows at Harvard.  They live in London with their nine year old son whose school is twinned with an Afghan school.

Bridget Cowper-Coles 

Born in 1953 and educated at home until the age of 12, then at Malvern Girls’ College, Lady Cowper-Coles went on to do a bilingual secretarial course at Cambridge Tech and then to study Arabic at SOAS. Having graduated, she spent a year in the Yemen Arab Republic teaching English Language at the
University of Sana’a.  

Having worked for MEED (Middle East Economic Digest) in their photo archive, she went to live in Cairo with her sister where, in 1981, she met and married Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a diplomat at the Cairo Embassy. They have 5 children.

Since then, they have been posted to London, Washington, Hong Kong (up until the hand-over), Paris, Israel and Riyadh. Currently, her husband is Ambassador at the British Embassy in Kabul. 

It is an unaccompanied post but Lady Cowper-Coles has been allowed to visit and has become obsessed with the need for us to help the people – especially the women and children.  “Education has to be my highest priority for helping them to help themselves out of their economic misery.”