Caroline is an urban development specialist who brings 11 years’ experience advising national and local governments in both Europe and Africa on city resilience and climate action. She has strong background in project and program management, resource mobilization, and partnership development.
Prior to joining GGGI, Caroline served as the Head of Programming for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Ghana where she was responsible for leading strategic direction, program quality, resource mobilization, and partner engagement for a $8 million / year multisectoral portfolio covering Health, Agriculture, WASH, and Youth development. In this role, she oversaw a team of 60 programming staff based in Accra and Tamale offices, including direct supervision of 8 Program / Project Managers working on awards from multiple donors including USAID, Hemsley Charitable Trust, EU, AGRA, and the Dutch Embassy. She also led new business development and submitted multiple proposals worth over $25 million in 2022 in a highly competitive funding environment and secured $14 million in financial commitments from the Mastercard Foundation for two agriculture value chain enhancement projects. Between 2020 and 2022, she worked as CRS Sierra Leone’s Program Director for Urban Resilience, providing strategic direction for the development and implementation of the country program’s urban resilience portfolio which included sustainable watershed management, community-led slum upgrading, solid waste management, COVID-19 emergency response and urban malaria projects worth US$6 million.
From 2017 to 2020, she worked as Senior Program Manager for the Global Resilient Cities Network, formerly 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) – Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, where she was responsible for managing and supporting a portfolio of ten African cities (including Kigali) as well as Paris in Europe. In this capacity, she was instrumental in building and nurturing the relationship with the Mayor of Kigali and a made compelling case to the 100RC Executive Team to salvage the partnership with the city after three years of mayoral transitions, which resulted in securing funding for the hiring of Kigali’s first Chief Resilience Officer and the development of an integrated resilience roadmap.
As Program Manager for IPE Global, an international development consulting company, she worked on behalf of FCDO and CDKN to advance climate compatible urban-industrial development along the corridor stretching between the cities of Mek’ele and Kombolcha in Ethiopia. From 2012 to 2016, Caroline worked in Paris as a transport planner at l’Institut Paris Region, a parastatal planning agency, where she led research and advised subnational governments in Ile-de-France on transport demand management (TDM) strategies and low carbon mobility solutions. In this role, she also contributed to the preparation of the World Bank-funded 2035 National Urban Development Spatial Plan for the Government of Ethiopia.
Caroline holds a MA in Urban and Regional Studies from Sciences Po Paris and a BSc in Economics from the University of Pierre Mendes France. Born in Djibouti from Ethiopian and Belgian parents, and raised in Lagos and her hometown Addis Ababa, she is fluent in Amharic, French, and English. She is passionate about strengthening African cities into equitable and resilient places where people can freely utilize their capabilities in pursuit of better lives. A self-proclaimed foodie, she enjoys traveling, hiking, going to art shows as well as collecting art by up-and-coming artists from the wider African diaspora.
Caroline s excited to have relocated with her husband to the Land of a Thousand Hills, a country she first visited back in 2016 during a short-term assignment for MININFRA which took her to all 6 secondary cities in Rwanda and that she visited on several occasions over the past 7 years.