Abebe Selassie

Abebe Selassie was appointed Director of the African Department (AFR) at the International Monetary Fund on 19 September 2016.

In a Fund career spanning 22 years, Mr. Selassie has worked in various parts of the institution. Most recently as Deputy Director of AFR, he was a key member of AFR’s senior management team, including overseeing the Fund’s highly successful effort to assist the three Ebola-stricken countries.

In other AFR positions, he was senior resident representative in Uganda; mission chief for South Africa; has led work on AFR’s Regional Economic Outlook, and has worked closely with policymakers from many of the region’s frontier markets (Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, and Kenya) to its more fragile countries (Burkina Faso, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone).

Mr. Selassie has worked also in the IMF’s Strategy, Policy, and Review Department (SPR), and in the European Department (EUR). In SPR, he worked on low-income country and emerging-market program and policy design issues as well as gaining extensive operational experience on a number of high-profile crisis cases. In EUR, he worked on Turkey and Poland between 1999 and 2003. In a second stint more recently, he was Assistant Director and mission chief for Portugal during the Eurozone crisis.

Before joining the Fund, Mr. Selassie worked for the Economist Intelligence Unit, specializing in sovereign credit risk issues, and then for the Ethiopian Government as Principal Economist in the Office of the President. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the City of London Polytechnic and a Masters in Economic History from the London School of Economics.