Dr. Eleni Z. Gabre-Madhin, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange since 2008, is an internationally recognized thought leader on agricultural marketing in Africa and global development, with a career spanning both research and development practice, and now business.
Prior to returning to her native Ethiopia, she served as Senior Economist at the World Bank and Senior Research Fellow with the Washington-based think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute. She has also worked at the United Nations as a Commodity Trading Expert, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Dr. Gabre-Madhin holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University, an MSc in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University and BA in Economics from Cornell University. She was awarded Outstanding Dissertation by the American Agricultural Economics Association in 1999 for her thesis titled, “Social Capital, Transaction Costs, and Market Institutions in the Ethiopian Grain Market.”
As a voice for African markets, she represented the African business community at the G-20 Business Summit in London in 2009, and is presently on the Nike Foundation-sponsored Advisory Panel on Girls in Rural Economies, as well as the Expert Group on Development Issues for the Government of Sweden, the African Union Task Force on Commodities, and the Stiglitz Task Force on Africa.
Dr. Gabre-Madhin is a Founding Fellow and Board Member of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, and was nominated in 2010 for Outstanding Businesswoman of the Year by African Business Awards.
