Mamadou Biteye OBE

Managing Director

Rockefeller Foundation Africa Regional Office

Since 2013 when he joined the Foundation’s Africa office in Nairobi, Biteye has overseen the Foundation’s work across Africa, which includes initiatives such as Digital Jobs Africa, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), YieldWise which is the Foundation’s flagship agriculture initiative in Africa, among others such as Transforming Health Systems and Informal Workers’ Health.

Biteye has decades experience in development, with expertise in strategic leadership, program development and implementation, public policy and advocacy, and community participatory development.

Some noteworthy achievements from his career include co-designing a micro-finance programme while he was Regional Director at Oxfam America, West Africa Regional Center, that is improving the lives of over 700, 000 women in Mali and Senegal. He has played a key role in the development of key policy processes in West Africa such as the ECOWAS’ Convention on Small Arms, and the ECOWAS’ Regional Mining Directives; at the Foundation he has led the charge in enabling 130, 000 of Africa’s high potential but disadvantaged youth access training to improve their skills and employability, leading to 40,000 of them accessing digital jobs; he is currently working to empower Africa’s small holder farmers to improve their livelihoods through increasing their incomes by gaining knowledge and access to better post-harvest management methods.

In 2015 he was awarded an honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, OBE, and is a member of the World Economic Forum Futures Council on Food Security and Agriculture.

Biteye is an agricultural economist by training, with Master’s degrees in Agricultural Economics from Ohio State University and The Crimean Agricultural Institute in the Ukraine. He speaks English, French, Russian, Portuguese and Wolof.