Olufunso Somorin 2024 Speaker

Regional Principal Officer

African Development Bank

Biography

Dr. Olufunso Somorin is a recognized and award-winning thought-leader on climate finance, environmental policy, carbon markets, ESG and inclusive growth with more than 17 years’ experience at the interface between environment and development in Africa. He is currently the Regional Climate Lead (East Africa) at the African Development Bank where he coordinates the Bank’s program on climate change and green growth initiatives in 13 countries. This includes supporting countries’ access to climate finance for implementing climate actions, and mainstreaming climate change in policies and programs. He leads strategic dialogues with public and private institutions on policy frameworks for managing local/regional economic and social issues. In the last 12 years in the Bank, he has been directly involved in the design, appraisal, and supervision of more than 250 development projects across multiple sectors, worth more than USD 20 billion. Over the last 17 years, Dr Somorin has published more than 40 articles on climate actions in Africa and have spoken in more than 300 conferences, workshops and summits. He holds a PhD in International Environmental Policy from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. As an Erasmus Mundus Scholar, he holds two MSc degrees from Finland and Netherlands. He is an alumnus of executive education from Bradford, Cambridge, and Oxford Universities in the UK, and University of California, Berkeley (USA). He gives guest-lectures at King’s College London, African Leadership University (Rwanda) and Strathmore University (Kenya). Somorin is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Africa Policy Research Institute (Berlin). He is recipient of several international awards, including the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowships (US) for his work on climate policy in Africa.