Young Professionals Network

She started her career in market finance as an assistant in sales for BNP Paribas Arbitrage in Paris, where she worked on structured products for major European institutions. Thereafter, she has joined Oliver Wyman, an international corporate strategy consulting firm where she had over five years of experience, mostly based in Paris. She has worked for several large-scale projects in various industries, among others waste and water management, consumer goods, transport and telecommunication, retail, and leisure industry. She has specialized in global transformation plans with a focus on value sourcing, organization redesign and operational optimization. Ajijti joined the OCP Group in December 2014, as a project manager within the Strategy and Corporate Development team before being appointed as head of projects of development for Southern Africa within the newly created subsidiary OCP Africa. She manages partnerships and development projects that aim at improving the ecosystem around smallholder farmers, particularly through offering a wider range of agro-services. Jihane is currently based in Casablanca.

She is also the Mauritanian chapter head of Africa 2.0, a community of more than 2,000 young leaders across the continent and diaspora, focused on capacity building and the promotion of entrepreneurship. In addition to her community work, Ba has worked on anti-corruption with GIZ in Mauritania, and on public financial management and accountability with the African Development Bank in Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire. She currently works in Nigeria on elections and youth political participation with the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement.

She previously served as the inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Research Fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security, where she published extensively on women’s political participation and economic empowerment. In 2014, she was selected as the inaugural The Hague Symposium Fellow for the International Peace & Security Institute, where she developed a four-week symposium focused on post-conflict transitions and international justice. She also worked with Vital Voices Global Partnership’s Human Rights team, aiding their efforts to end human trafficking. Rukmani helped develop best practices from Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Asia, and West Africa on how to create and implement programs that seek to combat child sex trafficking.

Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in political philosophy and a social sciences researcher. He has been a university lecturer and is often invited to social media workshops. In 2014, he became the first Cuban to be invited to the International Leadership Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists in the United States. Cárdenas Lema writes a weekly column on politics for the independent Dutch media El Toque and also writes for La Joven Cuba.