News

The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) Board has announced the appointment of Prof. Théophile Azomahou as the organisation’s new Executive Director.

 The appointment of Prof. Azomahou to the helm of the Nairobi headquartered international economic research and policy organisation is effective April 20, 2023, and follows the presidential appointment of former AERC Executive Director Prof. Njuguna Ndung’u as the Cabinet Secretary at the Ministry of National Treasury and Planning in the Government of Kenya.

“I would like to appreciate the AERC staff and network for the support they accorded to Prof. Azomahou in an Acting Capacity. I hope we will all continue to do so even as he fully settles into the Executive Director position,” said AERC Board Chairman, Prof. Ernest Aryeetey. He added that “We are confident that Prof. Azomahou has what it takes to steer the AERC in the right direction, and we wish him well in this role,” concluded Prof. Ernest Aryeetey.

Prof Azomahou is a national of the Republic of Benin and consequently will be the first Executive Director in the history of AERC to originate from a West African francophone country.

Prof Azomahou joined the AERC Secretariat in January 2021 as Director of Training, overseeing the three Collaborative Training programmes that support Economics and Agricultural Economics students at the Masters and Doctoral levels.

Prior to joining AERC in January 2021, Théophile was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Strasbourg (2001-2008), a holder of the Chair of Econometrics at the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (2005-2007), Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University, UNU (2008-2018) in which capacity he led the UNU research group on `Economic Development, Innovation, Governance and Institutions’, Professor of Development Economics at the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (2010-2020), Professor of Economics at the University of Lorraine-Nancy (2012-2015), Professor of Economics at the University Clermont Auvergne, CERDI (2015-2021), Professor of Research at the National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS (2018-2020) among other positions. 

Prof Théophile is a Professor of Economics. His research resonates around development economics at the frontier of evidence-based policy, quantitative empirics, and economic theory. He has a proven track record of publications in peer-reviewed journals and is a guest editor for several academic journals. 

His expertise includes sustainable human development, environmental and natural resource economics, health economics, intergenerational mobility in Africa, impact evaluation, applied econometrics, economic theory. Besides, he has acquired first-hand operation experience of conducting effective policy dialogues and negotiations with multiple development actors.

He holds a PhD and a master’s degree in economics, both from the University of Strasbourg, France. He also received an executive education on `A Cutting Edge of Development Thinking’ from Harvard Kennedy School, USA. He is a Senior Fellow of the Pan-African Scientific Research Council and has been serving as AERC resource person since 2019.