The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has taken its promise on gender balancing to task by tapping Dr. Antoinette Sayeh who was the Minister of Finance of Liberia from 2006 to 2008 as the Fund’s Deputy Managing Director. In this role, Ms. Sayeh, who has been a very prominent face at the Brettonwoods institution where she was Head Africa Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for eight years from 2008 to 2016 will in her new role as Deputy Managing Director assist Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria who, since last December, has been the Managing Director of the institution.
The appointment which takes effect from March 16 will usher the 62 year old Antoinette Sayeh as member of the highest policy making body on global financial issues which is the IMF Executive Board. She will also join the team of Deputy Managing Directors who support Georgieva in her missions at the head of the IMF. As head of the Africa Department, Sayeh led a “profound transformation of the relationship between the IMF and our African members,” Georgieva said. She was the first woman to head the department.
Sayeh is familiar with the back and forth between Liberian public institutions and multilateral institutions: after starting her career as a civil servant in Liberia’s Ministries of Finance and Planning, she then spent 17 years in various senior positions at the World Bank.
During her tenure, she had to deal with a dysfunctional Bank of Central African States (BEAC), manage the crisis between the IMF and the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), and moved to suspend all IMF assistance to Mozambique, which was revealed to have hidden a billion dollars in debt.
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Sayeh was also on the front line in responding to the economic consequences of the Ebola epidemic in 2014 and lead a crusade against energy and agricultural subsidies. The former Liberian Finance Minister was for four years a visiting researcher at the International Development Research Centre in Canada, which is associated with World Bank.
Concerned of the dangers of mass unemployment in Africa, Sayeh is fully aware of the relationship between budgetary policies and efforts to fight poverty through the IMF. Now as close to the IMF summit as an African can be (the institution’s leadership is usually a European), Antoinette Sayeh, who holds a BA in economics and a PhD in international economic relations from the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the USA, follows in the footsteps of Alassane Ouattara, Ivorian President who was the organization’s Deputy Managing Director from 1994 to 1999.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry