Mr Cheikh Oumar Seydi is the Africa Director for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he joined in 2018. Prior to this role, he was the regional director for sub-Saharan Africa at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). 

In this role, he managed IFC’s investment and advisory operations covering the region’s 49 countries. He has also served as IFC’s director for Eastern and Southern Africa and as its global director of Human Resources, covering more than 100 offices around the world. 

He originally joined IFC in 1997 as an investment officer focused on oil, gas, mining, and agribusiness development. Prior to IFC, Mr Seydi was a manager at Ernst & Young in New York, where he advised corporate clients on restructuring, reorganization, corporate finance, and business valuation. He also spent five years with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and began his career working for a variety of private banks and commercial auditing firms in Senegal and Belgium. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School in Boston, United States.