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Our Board

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Bonaventure Mbida-Essam

Mr. Bonaventure Mbida-Essama, a retired World Bank Official, serves currently as the Chief Executive Officer of the Nelson Mandela Institution.

 

Mr. Mbida-Essama currently also serves as a board Chair for NOIPOLLS. He also is Chair of the Emmanuel E. Mbi foundation, and a board member of three other institutions.

 

He has a long and varied professional experience. From1972 to 1979, he worked as deputy managing director and managing director of three different private sector companies in Cameroon, his home country. He then joined the World Bank at its Washington DC headquarters as financial analyst and subsequently became senior advisor to an Executive Director at the Board.

 

Later on, he moved to the International Finance Corporation, the private sector affiliate of the World Bank, as senior investment officer. He voluntarily left the World Bank in 1988 to start and run his own consulting firm in Douala, Cameroon, concurrently with a fertilizer business that he also started. He returned to the World Bank in 1999 as country manager in Cambodia. From there, he moved back to the World Bank Washington headquarters in 2003 as manager of Corporate Affairs and Administration before retiring in 2009.

 

On retiring, he founded MADIMBA LLC, a consulting firm and has since done high-level consulting assignments with the private sector, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Mr. Mbida-Essama holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Harvard Business School, Harvard University.

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Jean-Louis Sarbib

Jean-Louis Sarbib is a Board Member of NOIPolls Limited.
He is Chief Executive Officer at Development Gateway, an international nonprofit social enterprise with the mission to reduce poverty in developing nations by improving aid effectiveness, governance, and transparency through information technology. Sarbib was at the World Bank where he occupied several senior positions.

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Jean Louis-Sarabib, a member of the board of NOIPolls. He was World Bank’s Vice President for Africa, the Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as Senior Vice President for human development, with global responsibilities for the World Bank activities in education, health, social protection, and HIV/AIDS.


He also was with Wolfensohn & Company as a Managing Director. He serves on the boards of World Links for Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, The International Center for Conciliation, and FXB International. He served on the board of GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), the board of UNESCO’s International Institute for Education Planning, chaired the governing board of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, and represented the World Bank at Head of Agency level at the UN-AIDS Committee of Co-Sponsoring Agencies.


Sarbib has received numerous Honors and a Lifetime Award for Diversity and Inclusion from the World Bank.

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Jane Ebong

Mrs. Jane Ebong is a professional Public Relations Expert. She has held senior roles in the Nigerian Civil Service and retired as the Executive Director Services in NETCO – a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) after being duely screened and appointed by the FGNs Presidency.

 

She joined the board in 2008 as its Treasurer and is a member of the Finance and Administration Committee.

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Tijan M. Sallah

Tijan M. Sallah, a Gambian-American economist, received his PhD in economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) and has taught economics at several American universities before joining the World Bank.  At the World Bank he worked on agriculture and rural development in Africa, South Asia and MNA region, and retired as Sector Manager for Agriculture and Rural development for Southern and East African countries.


In addition to being an economist, Sallah is also the Gambia’s foremost living poet and writer, who has published/edited 13 books.  He has been described by critics as one of Africa’s most significant poets and writers following the generation of Wole Soyinka and novelist Chinua Achebe. 

 

He has published six collections of poetry (When Africa Was a Young Woman, 1980; Kora Land, 1989; Dreams of Dusty Roads, 1993; Dream Kingdom: Selected Poems, 2007; Harrow: London Poems of Convalescence, 2014;  I Come from a Country, 2022); edited three poetry anthologies (New Poets of West Africa, 1995, and The New African Poetry, (1999-coedited with Tanure Ojaide), and most recently the mega anthology of world poetry, A World Assembly of Poets, 2017. 

 

He has also published (co-authored with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) a biography of Africa’s most famous novelist, Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light, 2003 (recommended by The Guardian, July 22, 2008 issue); published a short story collection, Before the New Earth, and most recently published a book of critical essays on literature and culture titled Saani Baat: Aspects of African Literature and Culture, 2021. 

 

His works have appeared in many major African short story and poetry anthologies, including the classic The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier.  He was awarded the top literary prize by Young Writers Association (YWAG) and the Writers Association (WAG) of the Gambia. A book of critical perspectives on his works by various scholars, Tijan M. Sallah and Literary Works of the Gambia, was edited by Professor Wumi Raji and published in 2014 by Cambria Press, US.

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Paul Chukwunenye Nwabuikwu

In over three decades of a rich professional career, Paul Nwabuikwu has traversed the inflection points of Nigeria’s communication landscape as a journalist, advertising executive, public communications expert and public intellectual.

Winner of the DAME Award for Informed Commentary, Paul has served on the Editorial Boards of The Guardian and THISDAY and coordinated an award-winning team as a senior copywriter at Insight Communications.

He also had a stint as Government Relations Manager with British Gas Nigeria and served twice as Special Adviser on Communication to Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the Federal Ministry of Finance.

Pioneer Director of Communications of NOIPolls, Paul is currently Lead Consultant of

I & R, a strategic and public communications firm.

He is also Chair of the Board of the Disability Rights Advocacy Centre (DRAC), an NGO which supports women with disabilities.

Paul is married with three children.

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