Boris Houenou
Former faculty member at Washington State University, Harvard Kennedy School
After holding a faculty position at Washington State University, teaching economics, and spending a year at the UNDP HQ working on evaluating the institution’s interventions in middle-income countries, he joined a Californian tech company in the space, defense, military, and secure communication, and commercial satellite broadband Internet industry. His work laid the groundwork for access to broadband Internet for hundreds of thousands of households in Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Nigeria, and DRC. In partnership with Microsoft, the scale will now reach over 10 million people across the global including the US, and particular multiple African countries, including Egypt, Senegal and Angola. The success was leveraged in the US new Digital Transformation with Africa (DTA) initiative that President Biden announced during the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. He is a keynote speaker at numerous professional conferences, including the American Economic Association. He is taking the public administration program at Harvard Kennedy School to prepare for a pivot in public life that he left twelve years ago when he worked as an advisor on a presidential campaign in Benin. He earned a PhD in Economics from Washington State University.
Speaker Schedule
Saturday, March 25 2023
at the Harvard Kennedy School of GovernmentEU - Africa: Assessing the Relationship in the Context of War in Ukraine Youssef Chahed , Dr. S. Ayse Kadayifci-Orellana , Katarína Mathernová , Boris Houenou Moderated by Peace Uwase