ADEL Bios

Salem Afeworki is a seasoned sustainability leader who is passionate about making a positive impact locally and globally. Salem is the first Energy and Sustainability Manager for the City of Costa Mesa and is responsible for developing and implementing sustainability programs citywide. Prior to joining the City, she founded Value Sustainability, a boutique consultancy that specializes in climate change and community engagement services based in Southern California.

Cire Ba is Executive Director, CIRTECH-CTC and has over six years of experience in political consulting. After the completion of his master’s degree in management studies from the Bordeaux Management School, he began his professional career in the management of development projects before specializing in public communications. 

Anand Reddi is a global health specialist at Gilead Sciences, Inc., a major multinational biotechnology company that focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative medicines.

Megha Aggarwal is the co-founder and CEO of LEAP Skills Academy. LEAP stands for Learning, Employability and Progress, and was founded to create opportunities and enable employment for motivated students in small towns in India. 

Jihane Ajijti works for OCP SA as the head of project and development for Southern Africa. She is a graduate of HEC Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales) and a candidate of Africa Business school executive master’s in business administration partnership with Columbia Business school. 

Ahmed AlAhwal Tarek is an architect with academic and professional experience in urban development. 

As the regional manager for West and North Africa for EnergyNet, Valeria Aruffo currently works with governments across West and North Africa promoting investment into the energy, electricity, and infrastructure sectors with a clear focus on energy access and economic development in Africa through project implementation, climate finance, technology transfer, and capacity building. 

Khadijetou Ba is a citizen activist passionate about pan-Africanism and governance. She is a founding member of Leadership-Ethics-Governance and Strategies for Africa (LEGS-AFRICA), a Senegal-based CSO that promotes leadership qualities for Africans and a thinking model based on African values and principles. 

Dana Bekri is a member of the International Staff of the NATO Headquarters in Brussels. She is currently working in resource management for the NATO Security Investment Program, reinforcing the delivery of common-funded Alliance capabilities. 

Rukmani Bhatia currently serves as the special assistant to the assistant administrator for Europe & Eurasia at the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Adam Bouhadma is the head of Education Media Company, a startup working on the editing of educational websites. Bouhadma is also founder of anqabot, a tool used to audit any website, giving practical recommendations.

Harold Cárdenas Lema is the founder of “La Joven Cuba” (The Young Cuba), a well-known blog platform for young people who want to exercise political participation in their country. 

Karim Chbani currently serves as an investment manager within the SNI investment fund in Morocco, where he is responsible for the structuring and execution of M&A transactions. 

Emil Chireno is a Dominican attorney and the current executive director of the United Nations Association of the Dominican Republic. Chireno was appointed by the President of the United Nations Association of the Dominican Republic, Dr. Leonel Fernández, in 2013.

Julia is a Communications, Public Affairs and Events Specialist. Born in Romania and raised in France, she spent 7 years in the United States (NYC) where she studied, and worked.

John M. Dionisio is currently a senior investment director at Meridiam, an investment firm that manages $5 billion of capital to invest in infrastructure projects and Public Private Partnership (“P3”) assets in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. 

Fitsum Girma has been working at Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2012. Currently, he is working as a Foreign Service Officer in charge of the North African Countries in the office of the Directorate General of the African Affairs where he is in charge of managing and coordinating the bilateral relations of Ethiopia with North African countries.

Jessica Gottsleben is the first-ever elected ambassador of Running Start, a nonprofit organization that trains young women to run for elected office. 

Pedro Guerra is special advisor to the São Paulo State Governor since 2013. In this position, he makes contact with São Paulo state’s secretaries, enterprises’ CEOs, national, state-level and local representatives, and mayors in order to provide summarized information and analysis to support the governor’s actions and policies. 

Soufiane Khebbaz is a professor with the Ministry of Education and a program assistant with Derb Ghalef Association for Development. Khebbaz worked in the nonprofit community in Casablanca as an office manager and a program coordinator for the past six years. 

Kelsey Lilley is associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Her work focuses on emerging security threats and political developments across sub-Saharan Africa, in particular the Horn of Africa. Prior to the Atlantic Council, Lilley worked for the Society for International Development, where she offered operational and financial support to the membership-based international development organization. 

Paola, after 10 years in Brussels, recently returned to Italy where she is currently a Fundraising/Business Development Consultant in the field of arts, culture and urban regeneration projects: she is supporting Accapiù, a communication agency specialised in territorial and creative marketing and activation campaigns in the identification of new business opportunities in Milan and Fondazione Giulini, with the coordination of a community project in a marginalised area of Sardinia.

Carlos Gerardo Martínez González is the dean and founder of the Instituto Internacional de Estudios Superiores Campus Nuevo Laredo, a private university in the border between Mexico and the United States that promotes the logistics competitiveness of North America.

Based at the Mandela Institute for Development Studies, Mandisa is a professional in the development space, with over five years of experience in program strategy and policy advocacy. 

Lea Metke joined Ifri in 2014 as a project officer for the Study Committee on French–German Relations (Cerfa). She holds a master’s degree in European studies and a bachelor’s degree in European studies and applied foreign languages from Sorbonne University.

NaaKoshie Mills is a Public Policy lecturer at Howard University and doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research examines the impact of race and racism in U.S. foreign policymaking in the Global South, with particular focus on democracy and human rights promotion. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a career diplomat at the U.S.

Kiron Neale is a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom working on his PhD that looks at residential solar energy transitions in Small Islands States.

Mary-Jean Nleya is a freelance writer and was most recently the senior editor for the Harvard Africa Policy Journal. 

Parfait Ouattara is a young Ivorian who is passionate about technology. He is CEO of  TaxiJet.

Leonardo Párraga is a Colombian activist who believes in the value of systemic change through sustainable peace, increasing community well-being, and building strong networks. Passionate about the arts, alternative development, and constant learning, Leonardo has a wide range of experience in nonviolent resistance.  

Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge where she works at the interface of science and policymaking at the project 'A Science of Global Risk'. She is a Peruvian scientist that started her career as a researcher on molecular biology, neurosciences, biomedicine and developmental biology.

Obajide Rotilu is a senior consultant at Deloitte Nigeria. He also currently serves on the Deloitte West Africa Strategy team. He is a seasoned management consultant and a subject-matter expert in cybersecurity.

Benjamin Schmitt is currently a European energy security and science and technology policy advisor for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Energy Resources (ENR), where he is also serving as the current IEEE Department of State Science and Technology Policy Fellow. 

Pedro is a Leibniz-DAAD Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg as well as a non-resident researcher at the Center for International Studies, University Institute of Lisbon (CEI-IUL). 

Merel Severyns currently works as an investment manager for Partners in Equity, a venture capital impact investment firm. Before joining Partners in Equity Merel worked as an analyst at ING Belgium, prior to this she worked at IBM. At IBM she worked in policy and regulatory affairs, and also as a consultant for clients in the financial and public sector.

Nisrine Tahri is the founder X-large, a digital and communication agency based in Technopark Rabat. She is also the founder of a nongovernmental organization that aims to solve the educational problems in Morocco.