Adedana Ashebir

Regional Director, Africa and Middle East at Village Capital

Speaker

As Regional Director, Africa and Middle East, Adedana oversees the growth, health, and expansion of Village Capital’s work and teams in these regions. She’s particularly passionate about further leveraging the organization’s learnings to better support locally founded and led entrepreneurs and intermediaries. Sample research she’s led or supported includes the Beyond Payments fintech report and this brief on agriculture investing in Africa.

Adedana joined Village Capital from the African Leadership Network (ALN), a community of the continent's young, dynamic, and influential leaders. At ALN, she built and managed the Africa Business Fellowship, a program that matched young American business leaders with leading African corporates and startups for short-term work placements in five countries. Prior to that role, she served as Chief of Staff to the ALN CEO and was a communications strategist for the Sino-Africa Centre of Excellence, a think tank and research hub dedicated to China-Africa private sector engagement. Her early research and work have taken her to Ethiopia, China, South Korea, Nicaragua, and now Kenya.

Outside of work, Adedana enjoys mining the Internet for comedy. Adedana is a graduate of Yale University, Beijing Normal University, and the Yale School of the Environment. She speaks Spanish and Mandarin along with survival Amharic and Tigrinya.