The executive director (corporate services), general counsel and chief operating officer at Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), the pan-African development finance institution, Dr Adesegun Akin-Olugbade boasts over 30 years of experience in the legal profession and financial services sector. She has worked at both the technical and management levels in the public and private sector for leading commercial law firms, development banks and international financial institutions.

AFC’s legal team under his leadership has provided rigorous legal and structuring support for the development and investment in over $4bn infrastructure projects across Africa. Notable examples of Dr Akin-Olugbade’s involvement in high impact and sustainable infrastructure projects include: the Main One fibre optic submarine cable, the Cabeolica public private partnership commercial wind farm in Cape Verde, the Bakewena Toll road in South Africa, greenfield power plants in Ghana and Rwanda and the flagship Henry Konan Bedie Bridge. In 2015 Dr Akin-Olugbade also co-led the legal team that instituted the legal framework and pricing of AFC’s inaugural $750m 4.4% five-year international bond, which represented the first issue under AFC’s $3bn global medium term note programme.

The company’s second Eurobond issue was made in April 2017 with a seven year, unsecured Eurobond worth $500m. This Eurobond received strong global interest and was six times oversubscribed with an order book of $2.4bn from investors from across the world. Dr Akin-Olugbade’s ability to seamlessly resolve day-to-day challenges encountered in his work are attributed by sources to his ability to ‘simplify complex legal issues to non-lawyers’, as well as to combine ‘stakeholder expectations of being a problem-solver with the necessity and obligation of articulating a legal opinion without being considered a pessimist or an obstacle to business development’.

Dr Akin-Olugbade formerly served as general counsel and director at the African Development Bank, as well as pioneer chief legal officer and head of the legal services department of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). He holds an LLM qualification from King’s College London, as well as an LLM and PhD qualifications from Harvard Law School.