Yao Parfait KOUASSI joined the Bank in June 2019 as a Team Assistant for IDEV.2.
Previously he studied English at the University of Abidjan where he obtained a Bachelor of Art in English in 2000. While studying for his Master of Art in English, he passed a competitive exam and was awarded a scholarship from the Ivorian Government in collaboration with the AUF (the Francophone University Agency) to study at the Institut des Langues Etrangères Appliquées at the University of Dakar. Through this professional training opportunity, he was also able to obtain a Master in Languages Applied to Tourism and Business graduating in 2003. This then paved the way for him to move into business and management studies and led him to sit another competitive exam to join the Institut Supérieur de Management de Dakar (ISM-Dakar) as training assistant and a trainee in their postgraduate programme. He worked and studied at ISM from 2004 to 2007 and took the opportunity to also obtain an International MBA and a Master in Quality Management. He left ISM-Dakar in January 2008 to join the field of project management.
From 2008 to 2013, he worked as a Project Assistant in charge of logistics in a health project, which was funded by the WHO and located at the National Tuberculosis Control Program of Dakar-Senegal. Before the close of the project in 2013, he was promoted to Project Administrator in charge of managing the budget and the administrative aspects of the project funded by the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trial Partnership in Senegal, Benin and Guinea Conakry, where he worked from January 2011 to December 2014.
As a result of this experience and his Master degree in Project Management obtained in 2012 at Ecole Superieure de Management de Project in Dakar, he had the opportunity to join the AfricaRice Center as Senior Administration and Finance Assistant, where he worked from March 2015 to September 2017. In this role, he was in charge of Procurement and Logistics in the Support to Agricultural Research for Development of Strategic Crops in Africa (SARD S-C) project funded by the AfDB. At the end of SARD S-C project, he joined the Korea Africa Food and Agriculture Cooperation Initiative (KAFACI) as Project Administrative Assistant in charge of procurement and Logistics, where he worked from September 2017 to June 2019 when he left the AfricaRice Center and joined the AfDB. The desire to get more skills and qualifications in the field of agriculture also led him to obtain a Master in Rural Development and Cooperation at Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis, Senegal graduating in 2016.