Dr. Zainab Usman

Dr. Zainab Usman is the founding director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Her enduring area of expertise is identifying the policies and institutions to enable low and middle-income economies to harness their natural resources to achieve sustainable economic development. Prior to Carnegie, Usman was at the World Bank as a public sector specialist where she worked on energy policy reforms, natural resources management, and disruptive technologies. Usman contributed to the World Bank’s flagship report on Rethinking Power Sector Reforms in Developing Countries. She is author of the book Economic Diversification in Nigeria: the Politics of Building a Post-Oil Economy, which was selected as one of the Best Books of 2022 on economics by the Financial Times. Most recently, she was the lead author of the paper, How Can African Countries Participate in U.S. Clean Energy Supply Chains? Her work has appeared in Al-Jazeera English, BBC, Bloomberg News, the Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate and The Washington Post. Usman obtained her doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford.