Allen Sophia Asiimwe

Biography

Allen is an international trade and development practitioner with proven success shaping long-term vision and offering strategic leadership to nurture growth across commercial and non-profit sectors working across Africa. She has excelled in spearheading scalable projects/portfolios across the continent, driving decision-making to deliver robust results reducing the time and cost to transport goods along key transport corridors, and increasing exports and Jobs. Allen holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (Edward Mason Fellow, 2017) and a Masters in International Business Law from the University of Manchester, UK (1998). In her current role as the Deputy CEO and Chief of Programmes at TradeMark Africa (www.trademarkafrica.com), she oversees an annual programme budget of approximately $110m, strategic direction, operations and technical delivery of TMA’s entire project portfolio in infrastructure, trade environment (including trade policy, digital trade and quality standards), and business competitiveness spanning 23 countries in Africa. Allen also chairs the Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Steering Committee charged with driving the sustainability agenda in corporate decisions and programming. Allen is also a co-founder of Girls For Girls, a global mentoring initiative that seeks to empower ONE million girls and women to lead. Girls For Girls now has a footprint in 40 countries globally, (of which 11 are in Africa) with over 2,000 mentors and has graduated more than 12,000 mentees.