Eleni Z. Gabre-Madhin, PhD

Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin is a renowned thought leader, entrepreneur, and Executive-in-Residence at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where she advises on African entrepreneurship. She serves as a Board Director for the Ethiopia Securities Exchange and formerly launched Timbuktoo Africa, a $1 billion initiative supporting African startups, as Chief Innovation Officer at UNDP. She founded blueMoon, Ethiopia’s leading agri-tech incubator, and blueSpace, a prominent co-working space in Africa. Additionally, she established eleni LLC, an advisory firm for commodity exchanges across seven African countries, and was the founding CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), the continent's first of its kind, which traded $1.2 billion annually within three years, impacting millions of farmers. With a career spanning academia, policy, and business, Dr. Gabre-Madhin has served as a senior economist at the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute. She holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University, where her dissertation received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association. Her awards include the 2023 Global Economy Prize from the Kiel Institute, the 2024 Adwa Award for Pan-Africanism, and honors from Newsweek, Forbes Africa, and Wharton. Featured on platforms like PBS’s The Market Maker, Dr. Gabre-Madhin also serves on the boards of organizations such as the ONE Campaign Africa and Syngenta Corporation, where she played a role in its $43 billion acquisition by ChemChina.