UN’s rural poverty agency, IFAD, names a finance and development expert as new Vice-President

Yukiko Omura to take up post in early 2010

Rome, 16 December 2009 – Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), announced to the Fund’s Executive Board, currently meeting at its Rome headquarters that Yukiko Omura, a Japanese national with more than 25 years of experience in international finance and development, will be the seventh Vice-President of IFAD, effective 1 February 2010.  

In her most recent role as Executive Vice President of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) of the World Bank Group, Omura achieved unprecedented results in emphasizing the importance of infrastructure investment for development outcomes.

She began her career as a project economist with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. After spending 10 years with JP Morgan, she held senior positions at Lehman Brothers, UBS Japan and the Dresdner Bank. In 2002, she founded the AIDS Prevention Fund, a charitable company based in London.

Notes to Editors:

Kanayo F. Nwanze was elected IFAD President by delegates from 165 Member States in February 2009 and took office on 1 April 2009.  Since then he has met with leaders from both developed and developing countries and participated in key high-level summits and conferences. In these meetings he has emphasised that IFAD’s work is more crucial than ever, now that the global food security crisis has put agriculture back on the international agenda. 

Nwanze has underlined that IFAD is doubling its efforts to advocate for smallholder farmers – the women and men whom it serves - and to convey the message that smallholder farming and rural development hold the key to global food security.

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Press release No.: IFAD/65/09

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) works with poor rural people to enable them to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. Since 1978, IFAD has invested over US$11 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries, empowering some 350 million people to break out of poverty. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the UN’s food and agricultural hub. It is a unique partnership of 165 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).