Aklilu Fikresilassie

Aklilu Fikresilassie is the Director of Thriving Resilient Cities at WRI Africa and Representative of WRI in Ethiopia.

Aklilu has more than 16 years of professional leadership and technical experiences in the field of Urban Development and Management as well as managing non-governmental programmes. Prior to joining WRI, Aklilu spent 7 years at United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) as a Programme Manager, representing the agency in Ethiopia. while working with the UN-Habitat, Aklilu has successfully represented the agency in the United Nations Country Team and played a key role in position the urban agenda in the UN joint programmes and supported the Ethiopian Government’s endeavor towards Sustainable urbanization. He also worked with UNDP in South Sudan as Planning Specialist and team leader. Further, Aklilu led the bureau of Finance and Economic Development where he managed the government and NGOs, bilateral and multilateral programmes.

In addition to his managerial and technical role, Aklilu is a researcher on thematic areas such as urbanization, environment, water resources and common pool resources.

Aklilu is a qualified Urban and Development planning, monitoring and evaluation specialist with a Master of Arts degree in Urban Management and Development (specialization: Urban and Regional development strategies) from Erasmus University, the Netherlands (2006).