Dr Maureen Tong is an international lawyer; executive coach; trainer; published author; and a businesswoman.  She is the Founder of Kutlwelo Group, which is comprised of Kutlwelo Academy, Kutlwelo Resources, Kutlwelo Properties and SA Seychelles Travel and Tours.  

Dr Tong holds a PhD in international law from the Université de Strasbourg in France, where she successfully defended her thesis in French. She was awarded BIuris; LLB and LLM by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She also has certificates on Accession International Courts and Tribunals; Corporate Governance; Project Management; and Professional (Executive) Coaching.

Dr Tong has published academics articles and books on topics such as the right of indigenous peoples to political self-determination, political decolonization, reparations, restitution of land rights, land reform, women’s access to land etc. She recently published a book on coaching and self-care titled ‘Pour into Your Soul: Let Your Cup Overflow.’ 

She is the chairwoman of Kutlwelo Group and InvesTong Group. She serves on the Board of Legal Aid South Africa as a Land Rights Specialist. She is a Member of the Council of the University of KwaZulu- Natal as a Ministerial Appointee of the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation.  She is the Secretary General (SG) for the African Tourism Council (ATC) responsible for strategy and governance. She is CEO of SA Seychelles Travel and Tours, a Destination Management Company. 

Dr Maureen Tong is an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) of the International Coach Federation (ICF).  She is the former Deputy Company Secretary of Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA). She has coached and trained government officials and executives from several companies in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sweden, Spain, Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, Denmark, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, India and Pakistan. She is Former President of the Pretoria Chapter of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa (PSASA). 

Dr Tong has taught at the University of KwaZulu – Natal, and the University of Pretoria. She established the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TMALI), now called the Thabo Mbeki School of Public Policy and International Affairs at the University of South Africa (Unisa). She also established the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library (TMPL).  She has worked as a Consultant for the Thabo Mbeki Foundation. 

She currently teaches as a sessional (part- time) lecturer at Wits Business School (WBS), which is part of the University of Witwatersrand. She recently joined the University of Cape Town (UCT) Graduate School of Business to teach leadership on a part-time basis.  

She provides part-time Company Secretariat function at the Women’s Development Banking (WDB) Trust where she was Research Manager. She is a Board Member at PingLady, the incubator for women in technology. 

She worked as Project Officer for Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Namibia at the African Management Services Company (AMSCO) implementing the African Training Management Services (ATMS) a Project of the World Bank, African Development Bank (AfDB), International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).  

Dr Tong was the first Chief Operations Officer (COO) at the Department of Agriculture, Rural Development and Land Reform and later became Chief of Staff at the same Ministry. More recently, she served as Technical Advisor to the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture in South Africa in 2018/2019. She was Operations Manager a t UNDP South Africa 2006/7. 

Dr Tong was Visiting Scholar at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois and at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She has presented academic papers at City University of New York; American University in Washington; Catholic University in Madrid; and Vrije University in Amsterdam. She presented papers on economic, social, and cultural rights at the First World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She served as Research Assistant to the First United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights, Prof Rodolfo Stavenhagen from Mexico.   This was for the purposes of Rodolfo Stavenhagen submitting his first Annual Report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She accompanied the UN Special Rapporteur, Prof Rodolfo Stavenhagen, on missions to Spain, Kenya, and Botswana. She coordinated the Official Country Visit to South Africa by the UN Special Rapporteur, Prof Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

Dr Tong was Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Rights (CHR) at the University of Pretoria where she taught in the LLM in Human Rights and Democratization in Africa.  She supervised the LLM students on a visit to the then United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR) IN Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She supervised LLM students who worked as interns at the United Nations Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001. She was hosted by the Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Lund University, Prof Gudmundur Alfredsson, who was her PhD Supervisor. She was hosted by Marianne Wiber Jensen at the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

She worked as a Consultant at the John Langalibalele Dube Institute, now called Fuze Institute, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She delivered the John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Lecture in 2017. She was Street Law Coordinator at the Centre for Socio – Legal Studies at University of KwaZulu-Natal in 1995/6. She served as part of the Secretariat for the Electoral Code of Conduct Observer Commission (ECCO) during the first Local Government elections in KwaZulu-Natal in 1996.