Akinwumi Adesina

Often described as “Africa’s Optimist-in-Chief”, African Development Bank Group President Dr Akinwumi A. Adesina (1960) is widely lauded for his visionary leadership and passion for Africa’s transformation.

Formerly the Nigerian Agriculture Minister, Dr Adesina was first elected President of the African Development Bank Group on 28 May 2015. He was unanimously re-elected for a second five-year term on 27 August 2020. Dr Adesina graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics (First Class Honours) from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria, in 1981. Dr Adesina holds a master’s degree (1985) and a PhD in Agricultural Economics (1988) from Purdue University, United States of America, where he won the Outstanding Ph.D. thesis award for that year. Dr Adesina won the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Social Science Fellowship in 1988, which launched him into his international career.

A bold reformer, as Minister of Agriculture in Nigeria from 2011 to 2015 Dr Adesina turned the agriculture sector of Nigeria around within four years. Under his tenure, Nigeria ended 40 years of corruption in the fertilizer sector by developing and implementing an innovative electronic wallet system, which directly provides farmers with subsidized farm inputs at scale using their mobile phones. Within the first four years of its launch, this electronic wallet system reached 15 million farmers, dramatically transforming their lives.

With Dr Adesina at the helm, the African Development Bank Group achieved the highest capital increase since its establishment in 1964 when on 31 October 2019, shareholders from 80 member countries raised the general capital from $93 billion to a historic $208 billion. The African Development Bank Group responded boldly and swiftly to the Covid-19 pandemic. On 3 April 2020, the premier development finance institution launched a landmark $3 billion Covid-19 Social Bond followed by a Crisis Response Facility of $10 billion.

Dr Adesina has been recognized with numerous awards. On 19 October 2017, the President was conferred with the World Food Prize, also known as the “Nobel Prize for Agriculture”. On 29 February 2020, he was named African of the Year 2019 by one million readers of the African Leadership Magazine. On 14 December 2020, the Academy of Public Health, the flagship body of the West African Institute of Public Health, announced Dr Adesina as one of the winners of its 2020 Distinguished Fellowship Award for his successful efforts in helping Africa to curb the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

On 2 February 2022, the President was conferred an Honorary Doctorate by the Federal University of Technology in Nigeria in recognition of his global leadership in agriculture, food security, development finance, and good governance.