By Charles W. Corey
America.gov

Washington — A “strong and active” African Development Bank (AfDB) is what Africa needs to help its “long-held promise” become a reality, the U.S. executive director-designate to the bank told the U.S. Senate July 17.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mimi Alemayehou said that to achieve such promise, Africa must also meet higher expectations — including high standards of governance, full financial transparency in the public and private sectors, greater regional integration and better-developed skills among African workers.

She said the African private sector cannot thrive “without a significant upgrade of the continent’s infrastructure and financial systems,” and that is where the African Development Bank comes into play.

To meet high expectations, she said, Africa needs reliable partners such as the United States and strong institutions such as the AfDB.

Alemayehou said she shares President Bush’s vision of a “partnership of equals” between the United States and Africa.

“It is through such a respectful and engaged partnership that Africans can play a driving role in Africa’s development and African leaders can be accountable for their actions,” she said

“America’s style of government and its liberalized economic model put us in an exceptional position to help steer the bank towards the right policies and usher an unprecedented era of sustainable economic growth in Africa,” she told the lawmakers, who along with the full Senate must approve her nomination.

“The implementation of U.S. policy towards Africa, as well as our role on the board of the African Development Bank, together constitute key tools to help Africa achieve this growth,” she said.

The AfDB Group was established in 1964 by Africans representing 25 nations on the continent to promote economic and social development in Africa. It is a multilateral development bank that is a combination of the AfDB, the African Development Fund and the Nigeria Trust Fund, which, once joined, became known as the AfDB Group.

The AfDB Group has its headquarters in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, but has been temporarily relocated to Tunis, Tunisia, because of political instability in Côte d’Ivoire. The bank has financed more than 2,885 development projects, totaling more than $47.5 billion.

The bank has 53 African-country regional members and 24 members from the Americas, Asia and Europe. The United States is the bank’s second-largest nonregional shareholder. If confirmed as the next U.S. executive director, Alemayehou will represent the United States on the bank’s board of directors. The U.S. treasury secretary represents the United States on the bank’s board of governors.

Alemayehou said she is humbled by the nomination and excited about the prospects and challenges facing the African continent. “I do hope to have the opportunity to play a role in getting the United States and the African Development Bank to work more closely together in order to help improve the lives and dignity of all 940 million Africans,” she said.

Alemayehou told the committee that the AfDB is one of the most important regional development banks because it serves the world’s least-developed continent. “The bank’s activities have a very high impact on the region and therefore command the focused attention of Africa’s leadership,” she said.

Alemayehou told the committee that throughout most of her life, she made “personal and professional choices which prepared me for a focused and challenging role — to serve as a bridge, an enabler, between our country of opportunity and the continent of Africa, with its tremendous yet far from realized potential.”

Most recently, Alemayehou served as managing partner of Trade Links, a company that manages a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project to help African Growth and Opportunity Act-eligible countries in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa to increase their exports to the United States.

She is also a former director of international regulatory affairs at WorldSpace Corporation, a satellite telecommunications company providing radio services to the developing world. Previously, she worked as a foreign affairs adviser in the U.S. Congress and was employed by the Corporate Council on Africa and the World Health Organization. She holds a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, with a major in international business, international law and development.

“While I enjoyed working with the African governments and U.S. officials,” she said, “I took the most pleasure from working with African entrepreneurs who had great skills and products but were in desperate need of basic tools. They were in need of training or adequate equipment so that they can produce consistently high-quality goods on a meaningful scale and in a tight time frame.”

Today’s Africa, she said, “is a far cry from my early years in Ethiopia under a communist regime that left an indelible mark on me.”

“Entrepreneurship and democracy are now the order of the day.”