Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina

Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina is the President of the Africa Development Bank, he is often called “Africa’s Optimist-in-Chief”, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina 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. D.r Adesina graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Economics (First Class Honors) 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.