Khanya Mase is a fierce defender for human rights and is a development practitioner who has 4 years post-undergraduate experience working in various fields including non-governmental organisations, inter-governmental organisations, national human rights commissions, academia, and semi corporate within the mining and extractives environment.

By profession she works as a Company Secretary at the South African Women in Mining Association (SAWIMA).

By God’s divine intervention, she is a mother to a 7-year-old.

She went to an all-girls high school and after taking a gap year, she enrolled for an LLB at Wits. During her studies she was involved in the fees must fall movement which was one of the first signals of her commitment to social justice. Like many undergraduate law scholars, she had dreams of working at a big 5 law firm and it was in her third year of her studies after doing vac-work where she realised the corporate environment was not a good fit for her. In response to this realization, she later on in the year took up a job as a field worker at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI) where she conducted research and interviews on a case involving informal traders. This experience coupled with her academic devotion to Constitutional law leaned her towards a career focused on human rights. She is also the recipient of the Wits Michael Schewitz award 2015, was a Deans List scholar and a member of the Golden Key.

Upon completing her LLB, she pursued her masters with the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria and completed her mini dissertation on an exchange programme in Kenya with the University of Nairobi on the rights of informal traders.

While in Nairobi she worked as a Legal Intern at an NGO dealing with Governance issues called Katiba Institute. Her time in Kenya coincided with the 2017 elections, and propped her further into the practical side of Democratisation and Governance. Upon her return to South Africa in 2018, she applied for an internship with UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Kenya, however, due to various factors could not make the move to Kenya on an interns budget.

In light of this, it was only fitting that she join the South African Human Rights Commission. She worked as a Legal Research Intern under the CEO of the Commission. Throughout the year she explored various other opportunities including working as a Legal and Governance Intern at the Graca Machel Trust which ignited her passion for Corporate Governance within the NGO sector. She also worked for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as a Human Rights Intern.

In the summer of 2018, she received a job offer to work as a full-time lecturer in the school of law at Varsity College Pretoria. She worked in that role for 8 months and in March of that year assumed her role as a part-time Company Secretary with SAWIMA. She joined the company full time in July 2019 and has been with the company since.

Outside of law, she is an aspiring farmer and is working towards starting a renewable energy business. She also wants to start building her own property investment portfolio and looks forward to one day doing her pupillage as she endeavors to contribute meaningfully to the human rights discourse and propel the development agenda in Africa within the African Union.

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