The African Development Bank is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Ebrima Faal as the Director for the Nigeria Country Office with effect from 1 December 2016. The Nigeria Country Office is the largest single office of the African Development Bank, which oversees a portfolio of over US $5 billion and deals with 36 states of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory.
Mr. Ebrima Faal, Gambian, is a seasoned development leader with diverse global operational experience. He brings substantive expertise in banking operations, administration, and strategy, developed over nearly 25 years working at the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He is currently the Director of the Office of the Senior Vice President of the African Development Bank, where he executes and manages corporate performance, provides oversight for operations across different departments and Vice Presidencies of the Bank and supports corporate planning and strategy execution. He provided leadership on the design and approval of the new Development and Business Delivery Model of the Bank and the High Five priorities of the Bank to accelerate the achievement of the Bank's Ten Year Strategy.
He was the Regional Director for the Southern Africa Resource Centre (2011-2014), which he helped to establish and there he managed portfolio operations of $6 billion, the largest at the Bank at the time. He had earlier worked as Lead Economist (2009-2010) for the Southern Africa Region, where he led regional policy dialogues for all countries in the Southern Africa region and the regional economic community. He published the Bank's first regional integration strategy and helped to build resilience for countries in the region. He helped to design the multi-donor trust fund for Zimbabwe (the ZimFund) and led all negotiations and development of operational guidelines for the Fund. The Fund has raised more than US $200 million for energy and water projects and has gone through two successful replenishment processes. He is adept in solving complex problems, developing effective partnerships and delivering development solutions through dialogue, project finance, financial engineering, knowledge management, private sector operations and capacity building.
Mr. Faal holds a bachelor degree in commerce, economics and accounting from Mount Allison University, Canada; a Masters of Arts in Economics from McGill University, Canada and is currently a PhD candidate at McGill University, Canada.
The President of the African Development Bank, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, said of the appointment: "Mr. Ebrima Faal brings extensive leadership in operations management from his many years of experience within the African Development Bank and other international financial institutions. He successfully led the Bank to develop and establish its Southern Africa Regional Resource Centre. As a Senior Director in charge of the Nigeria Country Office, Ebrima's solid experience in economics, public financial management and operations management will help in further developing and managing the wide public and private sector portfolios in Nigeria, the largest regional member country of the Bank".
