Director

Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin is the founder and chief executive of blueMoon, Ethiopia’s first youth agribusiness/agritech incubator and seed investor. She also founded and served as chief executive officer of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange from 2008 to 2012 and created eleni LLC, which designs, builds, and supports the operations of commodity exchange systems in frontier markets.

A globally recognized thought leader on agricultural commodity markets and African development, Gabre-Madhin has held prior roles at the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva. She is also a founding member and board director of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, a board member of the ONE Africa Policy Advisory Board, and a member of the Africa 2.0 Advisory Group. Previously, she served as a member of the Stiglitz Task Force on Africa, the Government of Sweden’s Expert Group on Development, and as a director of Syngenta Corporation from 2013 to 2017.

Gabre-Madhin holds a doctorate in applied economics from Stanford University, a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Cornell University.