Hafez Ghanem is a development expert with many academic and policy publications; and more than forty-year experience in policy analysis, project formulation and supervision, and management of multinational institutions. He has worked and lived in Africa, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, and Asia.
He is a non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, a distinguished fellow at the Finance for Development Lab of the Paris School of Economics, a Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South in Rabat, and a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum in Cairo.
Between 2015 and 2022 he was Vice President of the World Bank, initially responsible for the Middle East and North Africa, then for Sub-Saharan Africa and then East and Southern Africa. In this latter capacity he was responsible for developing and implementing the World Bank’s strategy in the region, including a nearly USD 20 billion annual lending programme and a large volume of analytical work and policy papers.
During 2012-15, he was a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development program of the Brookings Institution. His research focused on the economic drivers of the Arab Spring, in six countries: Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen.
During the period 2007-12, he worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as the Assistant Director-General responsible for the Economic and Social Development Department. This department, with more than 300 employees from all over the world, is responsible for FAO’s analytical work on agricultural economics and food security, trade and markets, gender and equity, and statistics.
Prior to joining FAO, Hafez spent twenty-four years on the staff of the World Bank where he started as a research economist and then senior economist in West Africa (based in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire) and later South Asia (based in Dhaka, Bangladesh). In 1995, he moved to Europe and Central Asia where he was Sector Leader for Public Economics and Trade Policy (based in Washington DC). In 2000, he returned to Africa as Country Director for Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius and Seychelles (based in Antananarivo, Madagascar). Between 2004-7, he was Country Director for Nigeria (based in Abuja, Nigeria).
Hafez holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Davis. He is fluent in Arabic, English and French, and has intermediate Italian and some knowledge of Russian.
