Zenande Booi is the Executive Director of the Center.

She completed her LLB (JD equivalent) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2011. After graduating from UCT she worked with Equal Education, a community, membership-based non-profit organization, advocating for quality and equality in the South African education system. Soon after, she joined Ndifuna Ukwazi which, at the time collaborated and provided support to a number of organizations in Cape Town. While there she worked with social justice organizations that focused on safety and security, access to sanitation, and access to quality and equitable education in townships in Cape Town.

She then went on to clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa for the Honorable Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke. After leaving the Court, joined the Social Justice Coalition as a Senior Researcher where her research and advocacy work focused on the provision of safe and dignified sanitation to informal settlements across Cape Town.

She went on to study at Georgetown University Law Center where she completed an LLM in International Legal Studies with a certificate in International Human Rights Law in 2016. After her studies, she joined the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice as their Crowley Fellow in International Human Rights doing desktop and fieldwork research focusing on security of tenure in South Africa’s former homelands in the context of laws governing traditional leadership and mining.

Upon returning to South Africa, she continued with the research focus on customary law tenure security and land rights in South Africa’s former homeland areas. To that end. she joined the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town, later becoming its Lead Land Researcher. Her work at the Land and Accountability Research Centre focused on security of tenure of rural communities; customary and indigenous tenure systems; and principles related to free, prior, and informed consent as they relate traditional communities.