Vera Songweis an economist and banking executive from Cameroon who worked for the World Bank from 1998 to 2015, and in 2015–2017 served as Western and Central Africa's regional director for the International Finance Corporation.
She was the first woman to head the UN's Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) at the level of Under-Secretary-General. Songwe currently serves as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Africa Growth Initiative.
Career
Songwe worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and simultaneously had a visiting professor's appointment at the University of Southern California.
In 1998, Songwe joined the World Bank, where she worked in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) unit, covering Morocco and Tunisia. Over the subsequent years, she filled several roles in the PREM unit for East Asia and the Pacific region. In 2010, Songwe was part of the World Bank Group team that raised a historic US$49.3 billion dollars in concessional financing for the low income countries of the world as part of the International Development Association (IDA) 16th replenishment.
From 2011 to 2015, Songwe was Regional Director Africa covering West and Central Africa for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and Country Director for Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania. Her main areas of interest are fiscal policy, innovative financing mechanisms for development, agriculture, energy and economic governance.
In 2011, Songwe was involved in Africa 2.0, an initiative to bring young Africans together to aid in the continent's economic development. She is a scholar at the Brookings Institution, at its Africa Growth Initiative. Forbes listed her in 2013 as one of the "20 Young Power Women in Africa", and the following year the Institut Choiseul for International Politics and Geoeconomics chose her as one of their "African leaders of tomorrow". In 2015 she collaborated with the newly-founded Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme, which pledged $100 million for African start-up companies.
In July 2015, Songwe was appointed Regional Director of the IFC for West and Central Africa.
Songwe took up her role as the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on 3 August 2017 at the level of Under-Secretary-General.
In June 2020, Songwe and others – Nobel laureates in Economics, architects, chefs and leaders of international organizations – signed the appeal in favour of the purple economy ("Towards a cultural renaissance of the economy"), published in Corriere della Sera, El País and Le Monde.
On 22 August 2022, Songewe announced her resignation from UNECA.
