The governance committee of African Risk Capacity Limited has appointed 2014 Tutu Fellow Ladé Araba to join its Board of Directors. Ladé is the Managing Director for Africa at Convergence Finance. She is also the Co-Founder and President of the Visiola Foundation, which empowers African girls and young women through education, training, and mentoring in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Also appointed to the board was Sarata Kone-Thiam.
African Risk Capacity (ARC) is a specialized agency of the African Union that was established to help African governments improve their capacities to better plan, prepare, and respond to extreme weather events and natural disasters.
Through collaboration and innovative financing, ARC enables countries to strengthen their disaster risk management systems and access rapid and predictable financing when disaster strikes, to protect the food security and livelihoods of their vulnerable populations.
At ARC, she joins a group of other industry experts led by Abdoulie Janneh to steer ARC towards a more sustainable future through sound, ethical, legal financial and management policies and practices. Commenting on the new appointments, the director-general of ARC, Mohamed Beavogui, said: “We have always relied on the versatile technical knowledge and business savviness of our board members in setting the tone for smart operations. The appointment of Sarata and Ladé will invariably strengthen our strategy oversight and help consolidate the excellent governance practices we have acculturated over the years.”
Ladé has more than a decade and a half of development finance experience and previously served as Technical Adviser to the former Minister of Finance of Nigeria and was the Head of the Strategic Monitoring Unit. She was also an Adviser in the Power Sector Team at the Nigeria Infrastructure Advisory Facility (NIAF), a Technical Assistance Program funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID). Prior to NIAF, Ladé was Technical Adviser to the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) where she advised on the building blocks for financing regional infrastructure projects and promoting intra-African trade. She was a Senior Investment Officer at the African Development Bank, where she played key roles in deal origination and appraisal, and received Board approval for senior loans to several infrastructure projects across Africa. Ladé was also an Enterprise Development Specialist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and also worked for the QED Group LLC in Washington, DC.
In just over six years of operations, 56 policies have been signed by the ARC Member States, with USD 83 million paid in premiums for cumulative insurance coverage of USD 641 million and the protection of 64.1 million vulnerable people in participating countries.
Real News has a story on her appointment.
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