Marie-Ange Saraka-Yao is the Chief Resource Mobilization and Growth Officer at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Since joining Gavi in 2011, her leadership has been instrumental in driving Gavi strategic growth, setting up key initiatives and raising critical resources to provide equal access to vaccines for all. Under her stewardship, more than USD33 billion was raised from a wide investors pool to immunise more than 1 billion children. She drove the institution response to the pandemic with the development of flexible innovative financing facilities to attract more than USD 13 billion for delivering billion doses of covid-19 for 92 economies.

In her capacity, she cultivates relationships with a broad range of stakeholders and the Board: she is the lead negotiator with G7 and G20 leaders aiming to shape Gavi’s strategic relevance to address key development challenges such as aid architecture effectiveness, the nexus of health and climate change and digital development. Her teams lead the promotion of financial innovation notably for surge financing and regional manufacturing, leveraging diverse financial instruments (such as International Financing Facility for immunisation (IFFIm), Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) and the African Vaccine Manufacturing accelerator (AVMA). With active business development and portfolio management, Ms. Saraka-Yao has helped increase Gavi’s footprint with the private sector and innovators including overseeing and growing critical partnerships with major digital, technology ventures and international finance institutions (IFIs) stimulating innovative solutions for healthcare.

Prior to joining Gavi, Ms Saraka-Yao held several senior positions growing organizations, managing close to 100 staff, advancing business, policy and programmatic objectives notably in multi-stakeholder ventures and multinational development agencies.

As a senior executive to the President of the African Development Bank (Afdb), Ms Saraka[1]Yao advanced the reform and new strategy of the Bank notably vis a vis fragile states, regional infrastructure and private sector operations. She successfully led twice development policy and debt relief negotiations with international financiers.

At the World Bank Group (WBG), she played a key role in expanding partnership with other IFIs: she established a flagship inititiave of Afdb, WBG and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). She grew private sector mandate and instruments across several sectors in key emerging markets in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. She was awarded twice the WBG President’s Awards of Excellence for Innovation.

Marie-Ange is a French and Ivorian national. She holds a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Economics from the French Business School ESSEC. She is fluent in English, French and Portuguese.