Vivian Infante 2025 Speaker

“Vivianne Infante is a member of British International Investment’s (BII) Africa Coverage Team. She has held the roles of Country Director in Ethiopia (covering the Horn of Africa) and DRC, countries where she lived from 2015 until 2021. Vivianne has been instrumental in the origination and closing of various landmark BII investments including Safaricom Ethiopia (first private telecoms in Ethiopia) and Dashen Bank (first forex-denominated loan in Ethiopia).

Some of her latest achievements include the launch and development of ARIA as a multi-DFI initiative aiming to increase investment footprint in frontier markets in Africa, with a focus on Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, DRC and Ethiopia. ARIA, now funded by FMO and Proparco alongside BII, holds offices in each of these countries of focus and drives pipeline development, implements technical assistance to SMEs and enables investment-related ecosystem activities.

Vivianne qualified as corporate Solicitor in England and Wales in 2004 and worked at the City law firm White & Case as a Project Finance and International Arbitration lawyer. She is passionate about private sector development issues in the African continent and, in addition to DRC and Ethiopia, she has worked and lived in Nigeria (as counsel at the Nigerian sovereign wealth fund (NSIA) for the largest PPP infrastructure project in the country at the time), and as corporate lawyer in Ghana (as corporate international counsel having worked on the first oil exploration transaction at the time).”