Professional History: Fayelle Ouane is with the SME Investment fund at Adenia Partners in Abidjan. She is also the Co-founder and Managing Director at Suguba and a board member. She co-founded Suguba with another Tutu Fellow, Issam Chleuh, of the Class of 2019. Fayelle is an experienced general manager with more than a decade of experience. Throughout her career she has focused on business strategy and operations, including starting and building businesses, leading multinationals’ penetration and expansion across Africa, providing value-added strategic advice, change management, and financial advisory services to Fortune 500 companies and governments.

Prior to Suguba, Fayelle was the Novartis Social Business Cluster Head, West and Central Africa out of Cote d'Ivoire. During her career, Fayelle has worked consistently for access to medicine, a key element of her role there. She helped to develop a regional strategy for Novartis across public affairs, partnerships, and innovative financing. One of the projects she undertook was working with governments to provide a portfolio of medicines at $1 per treatment per month. Previously, she helped to design oncology patient access programs and started a generics division in Ghana to reduce drug costs.

Outside of her work in the drug industry, Fayelle is the co-founder of Impact Hub Bamako in Mali, the first full-service social enterprise incubator and co-working space in Francophone Africa. So far, the incubator has helped more than 20 startups find their feet, which in turn has had impacts in areas like food security, mentoring, and helping entrepreneurs survive the startup.

Academic and professional credentials: BA in International Relations from the University of Stanford
Masters in Business Administration from Harvard University

Programs: She is a 2014 African Leadership Network alumnus.