Dr. Olufunso Somorin

Dr. Olufunso Somorin is a Regional Principal Officer at the African Development Bank. He leads the Bank’s work on climate change and green growth in the 13 countries of the Bank’s Eastern African region. He also leads the Bank’s carbon markets program. He leads strategic dialogues with public and private institutions on climate policy frameworks, climate finance, renewable energy, nature/biodiversity finance, and green industrialization. Between 2013 and 2017, he coordinated the Bank’s work on addressing fragility and building resilience within the Horn of Africa. In the last 14 years in the Bank, he has been directly involved in the design, appraisal, and supervision of more than 300 development projects across multiple sectors, worth more than USD 20 billion. Dr Somorin has written more than 50 publications on climate policy in Africa. 

Somorin holds a PhD in International Environmental Policy from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. As an Erasmus Mundus Scholar, he holds two MSc degrees from Finland and Netherlands. He is an executive education alumnus from Bradford, Cambridge, and Oxford Universities (UK), and University of California, Berkeley (USA). He gives guest-lectures at King’s College London, African Leadership University (Rwanda) and Strathmore University (Kenya). Somorin is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Africa Policy Research Institute (Berlin). He is a recipient of several international awards and recognitions, including the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowships (US) for his work on climate policy in Africa. As a global leader on climate policy, Somorin is currently serving on the UN Secretary General’s Taskforce Expert Group on Net Zero Policy.