At Africa.com, we have always believed that telling Africa’s story with clarity and authority requires being in the right rooms, not just on the continent, but wherever the decisions that shape Africa’s future are being made.
Washington DC, New York, and the United States as a whole play a critical role in Africa’s future, not because of what happens here, but because of what gets decided here and felt across the continent. From the World Bank and IMF to the bilateral convenings that rarely make headlines but move billions, the United States is a critical node in Africa’s economic story. It is where capital is allocated, where policy gets made, and where the global narrative about Africa is too often written by people who have never lived there. That gap in perspective has consequences, for capital flows, for policy, and for the stories that never get told.
That changes today.
Africa.com’s US Contributing Editor, based in Washington DC: Liz Grossman Kitoyi, Co-Founder and CEO of Baobab Consulting.
Why Liz?
Liz is not an observer of Africa. She is someone who was shaped by it from the inside. She spent seven years based in Dakar, co-founding Baobab Consulting in Senegal in 2016 alongside Senegalese co-founder Tayib Fall, a firm designed from day one to operate seamlessly between the US, Africa, and the world. She is bilingual in English and French, giving her rare depth across both Anglophone and Francophone Africa at a moment when that distinction matters enormously.
Her institutional credentials are equally distinctive. She served as Senior Communications Advisor for Prosper Africa at the National Security Council and USAID, and as Senior Communications Officer for the African Development Bank’s AFAWA program, the flagship initiative advancing women’s financial inclusion across the continent. She has advised pan-African banks, development finance institutions, and governments across more than twenty countries. She is a Forbes Next 1000 honoree, a CSIS Africa Policy Accelerator member, and a recognized voice on the shift from aid-driven to trade-and-investment-driven engagement with Africa, the defining paradigm of the emerging post-aid era.
She is embedded year-round in the institutional ecosystems of both Washington and New York, the two cities where America’s relationship with Africa gets defined.
What Liz will bring to Africa.com
Liz is not in Washington to cover America. She is there to cover Africa, through the lens of the institutions, capital flows, and policy conversations that originate in the US but shape outcomes across the continent. Her dispatches will give our readers something rare: an insider’s lens on Africa’s potential and the narrative opportunities that too often go uncaptured in mainstream coverage.
She is already on the ground at the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings, one of the most significant gatherings of global finance ministers, development institutions, and private sector leaders of the year. And she will bring that same depth to the UN General Assembly, major US-Africa trade and investment convenings, and the rotating calendar of DC and New York gatherings where Africa’s future gets negotiated.
A critical moment
We are launching this partnership at a moment when the global conversation about Africa, its capital needs, its trade relationships, its role in the emerging multipolar economy, is shifting faster than most coverage can keep up with. Liz brings the positioning, the network, and the analytical depth to help Africa.com stay ahead of that curve.
We are proud to welcome Liz, and we look forward to the coverage ahead.
— The Africa.com Editorial Team
