About

International Finance Corporation, the largest global development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in developing countries, operates in 22 countries within Sub-Saharan Africa, with offices in Senegal, Kenya and South Africa, being its regional hubs for West and Central Africa, Eastern Africa and Southern Africa respectively. The ‘exceptionally talented, passionate and hard-working’ Africa regional legal team, as described by nominators, is spread across these hub offices: The general counsel is based in Johannesburg with two other lawyers and two legal assistants whilst an additional two lawyers are in each of the Dakar and Nairobi hub offices with another legal assistant based in Nairobi. IFC’s Africa region legal team is led by general counsel for Sub-Saharan Africa Zurina Saban who is described by nominators as ‘exceptional’ and is responsible for managing the company’s legal and regulatory matters in Africa, overseeing corporate and project legal risk across its sizable investment and advisory portfolios in the region, and as part of IFC’s Africa management team. Together, the Africa regional legal team have primary responsibility for ensuring adequate legal cover on all IFC investments, both new business and portfolio projects as well as advisory service projects in the region, including across all product types and industry sectors that IFC operates in. Given the scope of work required, the team consists of senior lawyers with approximately 100 years of combined post-qualification experience in banking, project and corporate finance among them and supported by legal assistants with significant experience on transactional legal services. ‘The Africa regional legal team’s ethos is grounded in its passion for Africa and its desire to bring about impactful change through innovation. Outside of its focus on investment, one of the team’s key commitments relates to knowledge sharing’, says Saban. To this end, the team creates and executes an annual knowledge sharing work plan, which focuses on sharing knowledge across business departments internally at IFC and also at capacity building initiatives outside of IFC. Impressing peers with their work and varied capabilities, one nominator had the following to say: ‘They not only all have superb technical ability and expertise to deftly execute many difficult and complex transactions across a wide range of African jurisdictions, with many different and varied legal and security and political and other risks, but do so with flexibility, commerciality and integrity, and are always an absolute pleasure to work with’.