Global Innovation Fund appoints Hashim Wasswa Mulangwa as its first Chief Strategy Officer – CEO East Africa

Hashim Wasswa Mulangwa has been appointed as Chief Development Strategy Officer for Global Innovation Fund (GIF) effective June 2020.

Hashim has been serving as the Country Team Lead (Uganda), running the Department for International Development’s  (DFID) Manufacturing Africa Programme at accounting firm BDO since November 2019. Manufacturing Africa is a £70m DFID funded Programme which provides support to increasing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the manufacturing sector in 4 countries — Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, contributing to the economic transformation of these economies through creation of jobs.

Before that, Hashim was the Deputy Team Leader / Director – Institutional Transformation & Results Delivery at Adam Smith International’s Strengthening Uganda’s Anti-Corruption Response (SUGAR). SUGAR is a DFID ( £30m) and EU funded programme aimed at supporting Uganda’s Anti-Corruption and Accountability Institutions to tackle corruption & improve service delivery.

“I am pleased to welcome Hashim Wasswa Mulangwa to GIF as our first Chief Development Strategy Officer, which will see him working across all GIF investments – including grants and risk capital investments – to ensure they are firmly grounded in evidence and development economics,” Alix Peterson Zwane, the GIF CEO wrote in a June 10, 2020 statement on GIF’s website.

 “I know that GIF will benefit from Hashim’s background in development and government across Africa. He joins GIF after leading a team of experts for the Uganda Ministry of Finance that supported the establishment of a Covid-19 Economic Response unit and development of the Government’s fiscal stimulus package,” said Alix.

“As Chief Strategy and Development Officer of the Rwanda Development Bank, he led the bank’s transformation agenda as a DFI that supports Rwanda’s development priorities. As Team Leader and Private Sector Development Adviser at DFID Rwanda, he managed a portfolio of nearly £100 million with investments across a diverse economic growth portfolio,” Alix further said of Hashim.

The Global Innovation Fund (GIF) is a non-profit innovation fund headquartered in London with an office in Washington D.C. that invests in the development, rigorous testing, and scaling of innovations targeted at improving the lives of the world’s poorest people.

Hashim graduated from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government with a Master of Public Administration (MPA) in Economic Development in 2011. He also holds an MSc Economic Policy and Management in Economics from the University of Strathclyde attained in 2007.

He has also recently served as a Board Member for Media Challenge Initiative until March 2020. The Media Challenge Initiative is a youth- led Organization that’s building the next generation of Journalists in Uganda and across Africa — creating job opportunities and telling impactful stories.

Between November 2014 to January 2018, Hashim Wasswa Mulangwa was the Chief Strategy & Development Officer at the Rwanda Development Bank (BRD).