Oulie Keita has 17 years wealth of experience and expertise in the domain of international development, particularly in policy and advocacy work on women and youth empowerment, governance, peace and security. She is the Executive Director for the YouthConnekt Africa (YCA) Hub, a programme created by UNDP and the Government of Rwanda, based in Kigali.
Oulie Keita is the Executive Director for the YouthConnekt Africa (YCA) Hub, a programme created by UNDP and the Government of Rwanda, based in Kigali. Prior to joining the YCA, she worked as the Francophone West Africa Director at ONE Campaign for the last five years, based in Dakar, Senegal. She established the Francophone Africa regional office for the ONE Campaign. There she led the development and implementation of ONE’s Africa strategy since 2015.
Oulie has 17 years wealth of experience and expertise in the domain of international development, particularly in policy and advocacy work on women and youth empowerment, governance, peace and security. Prior to joining ONE in 2015, Oulie worked as the Program Director for Freedom House in Mali for 3 years, where she established the West Africa Office for Freedom House and contributed to the development of a national strategy on building the foundations for Transitional Justice and national reconciliation. During her tenure in Mali she held high level advocacy efforts for the respect of women’s rights/human rights, youth empowerment, access to development finance and truth-justice-reconciliation in a post conflict environment.
« For the past decade we’ve made some great strikes to really make the business world women friendle…But we still run into roadblocks when it comes to women entrepreneurs »
Oulie is an UN Roster as Peace and Development Advisor and has worked for UNDP as such in many countries, including, DRC, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, and Mali. Oulie is a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland working on her doctoral and holds a Masters’ degree in Non-profit Management from the University of Regis in Denver, USA; A Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Maryland, USA; A certificate in Program Management; a certificate in Peacebuilding and Gender and a certificate in Security Sector Governance from the European College for Peacebuilding in Austria.
Over the last 17 years in her professional career, she has been active in various capacities with a focus on women/youth empowerment in the areas of governance, peace, security and development in Africa. “ For the past decade we’ve made some great strikes to really make the business world women friendle, she observes. But we still run into roadblocks when it comes to women entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs. So we are trying to find ways to connect these young women entrepreneurs to economic transformation.”
