Other Featured Speakers

Fanta Traore

Fanta Traore is pursuing a joint Master of Arts and Master of Business Administration degree at Yale University. She studies economic development, management, and public-private partnerships. Prior to attending Yale, she worked as a senior research assistant in the Federal Reserve System’s International Finance division, and spent nearly a decade in the social entrepreneurship ecosystem, working for Echoing Green and the Anzisha Prize, where she supported 100+ organizations. In 2018, she co-founded the Sadie Collective, with Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, the only organization dedicated to addressing the pipeline and pathway access for Black women in economics and related fields. The Collective has been featured on NPR, Fortune, Forbes, and the World Economic Forum. She has been recognized as a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum and is on the Board of Directors of WAKE Academy, an all-girls school in Guinea. Fanta speaks four languages and has worked across Sub-Saharan Africa. She is a proud alumna of Howard University where she obtained dual degrees in economics and political science and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.

Chinemelu Okafor works at the intersection of politics – particularly governance and political accountability – and economics, with a focus on development policy. She is a Predoctoral Researcher at Princeton University through the Emerging Scholars Program, where she provides advanced statistical analysis to various faculty members of the Politics department. She founded and co-leads (with Rahma Ahmed) the Research In Color Foundation: a non-profit that aims to increase the number of racial and ethnic minorities in economics by matching individuals looking to pursue doctoral degrees in economics, or economics-adjacent disciplines, with seasoned economists who will guide them through an independent research project.