Mamadou Biteye

Mamadou Biteye is the Managing Director for The Rockefeller Foundation Africa Regional Office. In this role, Biteye oversees the Foundation’s work across Africa, which includes initiatives in youth employment, health, philanthropy, and agriculture and food security, among others.

Biteye has a wealth of expertise in the development sector in Africa. An agricultural economist by training, he has over twenty-five years’ experience in strategic leadership, program development and implementation, public policy analysis, advocacy and campaigning and community participatory development. 

Some noteworthy achievements from his career include co-designing a micro-finance programme with Oxfam that is today improving the lives of over 700, 000 women in Mali and Senegal; Playing a key role in the development of policy processes in West Africa e.g. the ECOWAS’ Convention on Small Arms, and the ECOWAS’ regional mining directives. His accomplishments at the Foundation include executing Digital Jobs Africa, an initiative to connect Africa’s youth to jobs in the ICT sector; Leading the design and implementation of YieldWise, a $130m effort to halve post-harvest loss in Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria; At policy level, convening the Leadership for Agriculture (L4Ag) network of African ministers of agriculture and ministers of finance, a platform to enable them work better together to invest more to transform the sector; Co-creating PIATA, a new $280m Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa, among others.

Biteye is an honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE), awarded for work done under Oxfam GB, where he had been Regional Director for West Africa before joining the Foundation. He is a member of several advisory boards, including the World Economic Forum’s Futures Council on Agriculture and Food Security.
Biteye holds a Master’s degree in Agricultural Economics from Ohio State University in the U.S, and a Master’s degree and Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Economics from The Crimean Agricultural Institute in the Ukraine. He is also multilingual, speaking English, French, Russian, Portuguese and Wolof.