Vera Songwe is a rising star in the World Bank. An adviser
to the managing director of the bank and former Nigerian finance minister,
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, She is based in Dakar and a Cameroonian who has worked for
the World Bank since 1998
Forbes listed her in 2013 as one of the "20 Young Power
Women in Africa", and the following year the Institut Choiseul for
International Politics and Geoeconomics chose her as one of their "African
leaders of tomorrow".
Songwe grew up in Bamenda, in the north of Cameroon, where
she attended Our Ladies of Lourdes College, a private Catholic school, and thus
formed part of the local English-speaking elite. She obtained her PhD in
mathematical economics at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, and
afterward migrated to the United States, where she worked at the University of
Michigan for three years.
She accepted a position working for the Federal Reserve Bank
of Minneapolis, and simultaneously had a visiting professor's appointment at
the University of Southern California. In 1998, as stated earlier, she joined
the World Bank, where she worked in the Poverty Reduction and Economic
Management (PREM) unit, covering Morocco and Tunisia. Over the subsequent
years, she filled several roles in the PREM unit for East Asia and the Pacific
region.
From 2011 to 2015 she was operations manager for the World
Bank in Cape Verde, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Mauritania. In July 2015 she
was appointed Regional Director of the International Finance Corporation for
West and Central Africa.
In 2011, Songwe was involved in Africa 2.0, an initiative to
bring young Africans together to aid in the continent's economic development.
She is a scholar at the Brookings Institution, at its Africa Growth Initiative.
In 2014, African Business Review described her as one of the "Top 10
Female Business Leaders in Africa. In 2015 she collaborated with the
newly-founded Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme, which pledged $100
million for African start-up companies.
No comments:
Post a Comment