The Executive Director shall be the Head of the Secretariat.
Mrs. Simone Yankey-Ouattara
Mrs. Simone Yankey is currently the Ag. Coordinator of the African Union/International Centre for Girls and Women’s Education in Africa (African Union CIEFFA).
She is also the Senior Policy Officer at the African Union CIEFFA in charge of various portfolios. Prior to this position, she was a Senior Program Officer at the former Department of Women, Gender, and Development Directorate, currently known as the Women, Gender, and Youth Directorate at the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
She holds a D.E.S.S (Post Master’s Degree) in Human Rights from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and a Master’s Degree in Governance & Development from the Institute of Policy & Development Management (IOB), University of Antwerp, Belgium.
She is certified in a number of trainings such as gender-responsive policy and programme formulation, negotiation skills and preventive diplomacy, results-based management, gender and women's leadership, technical writing, public speaking, gender-sensitive education sector planning, management strategy, among many others.
She has been a social worker in a non-profit organization in Belgium and at a national level, she served as a legal advisor on Arts, Culture, and Human Rights in Ivory Coast.
Her vision is to see “An Africa in which girls and women are socially, economically and politically empowered through quality education throughout their lives”.
