Senbet Appointed To Serve On Ethiopian Diaspora Trust Fund Advisory Council

Lemma Senbet, the William E. Mayer Chair Professor of Finance at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, was recently appointed to serve on the advisory council of the Ethiopian Diaspora Trust Fund (EDTF). Senbet received the appointment from Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia's prime minister.

Senbet recently finished a five-year term as executive director and CEO of the African Economic Research Consortium in summer 2018. The nonprofit organization is the largest and oldest economic research and training network in Africa. During his African tenure, Senbet visited and led missions to 25 countries. 

Read more about his objectives for the EDTF in this interview with the Ethiopian publication Tadias.

"In some sense you can think of it as being in unchartered territory," Senbet told Tadias. "It's a new concept and a new vision from what appears to be a highly transformational leadership in Ethiopia. We need to seize this opportunity and we need to move fast because this momentum, who knows, it could slip by. That's why I feel strongly that we need get this EDTF right. We need to get it right on a variety of ways, one of which is to move consistently with the pace of the prime minister."