Leadership

Vincent Rague is the co-founder of Nairobi-based private equity company Catalyst Principal Partners, chair of Financial Sector Deepening Africa (FSDA) and of Jambojet Aviation, the low-cost airline and subsidiary of Kenya Airways. He is also a board member of UAP Old Mutual Kenya and MTN Group.

Vincent has worked in a variety of senior positions at the World Bank and was the International Financial Corporation’s (IFC) first regional director to South Africa.

Prior to this, Vincent worked at the Central Bank of Kenya, with Citibank in Athens and National Westminster Bank in London.

James is the executive director of global strategy and advisory firm Dalberg Group, a non-executive director of Old Mutual Group and of One Acre Fund, a non-profit organization that supplies smallholder farmers in East Africa with asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty.

Prior to Dalberg, James worked at McKinsey & Company.

James is a 2009 Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellow of the African Leadership Institute and has served on the Institute’s board. He is also a 2013 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and currently serves on the Program Advisory Committee of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Janice Kotut-Sang is a founding member of Sustainable Links, which aims to mobilise capital towards Climate solutions with a gender lens and sits on the Investment Committee of the Africa Local Currency Bond Fund.

Janice was previously Managing Director, PIDG Infrasolutions, which was set up as a GuarantCo initiative to be a pathfinder, arranger and collaborator aimed at mainstreaming local currency finance for infrastructure projects in frontier markets.

She also brings with her banking experience with Standard Chartered where she worked in Asia, UK and in Kenya. Janice has a LLB from Warwick University and a LLM from King’s College London and an Executive MBA with the Said Business School, Oxford University.

Carole is the chief operating officer of Africa50, a new investment fund set up by the African Development Bank (AFDB) to focus on high-impact national and regional infrastructure projects, mainly in the energy and transport sectors.

Before joining Africa50, Carole served as the assistant secretary general for human resources at the UN, leading transformational initiatives for the Secretary General and member states.

Prior to this, she worked at Coca-Cola in a number of senior roles, including chief of staff to the chairman and president of the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation.

Albert is director general, budget, fiscal and economic affairs at the National Treasury. Prior to this, Albert served as the director of the Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations Department of the National Treasury.

Albert has made significant contributions in the recent development of Kenya’s policy and legislative framework for public finance management, including the management of fiscal relations between the two levels of government.

He has also worked as a consultant for organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA-Rwanda), State University of New York (SUNY Kenya) and Society for International Development (SID).

Symon is an assistant director in the State Department of Trade at the Ministry of Industrialisation, Trade and Enterprise Development, a department he has worked in for the last 26 years.

Symon leads Kenya’s negotiations with the US around the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) – legislation that provides eligible sub-Saharan African countries with duty-free access to the US.

Symon holds a masters’ degree from the University of Antwerp in International Business, Trade and Commerce.

Robert currently serves as the chief state counsel for the Office of the Attorney General and Department of Justice in Kenya where his main objective is to review the Legal and Transparency Negotiation chapter on the ongoing Kenya-USA Free Trade Agreement.

Before moving to the Office of the Attorney General, Robert worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he provided legal advice to the Ministry, Kenyan missions abroad and other government entities around foreign policy.

Robert is an advocate for the High Court of Kenya and a member of the Law Society.

Jonathan has extensive experience in international financial market infrastructure organisations. He worked as a senior vice president at Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) where he helped establish and grow OTC Clear, a business that provides post trade risk-management services for over-the-counter (OTC) fixed income and foreign exchange derivatives.

Before this, Jonathan worked at the London Clearing House (LCH), a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) in a range of business development roles, including SwapClear which became the premier global interest rate swap clearing service. Jonathan started his career with Citibank in the UK and in Europe.

Currently, Jonathan chairs the Derivatives Market Oversight Committee of the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE).