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Up Close with Eleni Gabre-Madhin
Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the
Ethiopian Commodity Exchange

By Luladay Aragaw

With our exclusive interview, we were lucky to squeeze into her busy Sunday afternoon between time with her children and a visit to a biofarm.

Growing Up

Living in Rwanda, at the age of 12 Eleni single-mindedly applied to a boarding school in Kenya. When her parents, who were surprised by her action, asked her why she had done so, she told them that she had already crafted her ten-year future plan and Kenya was the start line.

“No one harassed me to do my homework, or anything…” Eleni laughed when speaking of her liberal upbringing.

“I always felt like my parents supported me and believed in me. I grew up very free to explore, speak my mind, and be my own person. For example, I did not wear a dress or nice girl’s shoes for about 4 years as a kid and that was okay. At 11 my parents opened a bank account for me to cover my own school supplies and allowance. This was my test of independence. Not that I didn’t go broke the first year!”

Eleni spent the first three decades of her life in six different countries, between the US, different parts of Africa, and Europe. She grew up in various cultures, picking up her trilingual skills in English, French & Kiswahili and becoming easily adaptable to people and cultures wherever she went.

Eleni left Ethiopia at age four as her father received an assignment abroad, came back two years later and joined Good Shepherd School in Addis Ababa. It was then that Eleni, had to relearn her mother tongue, Amharic. Following the upheaval of the 1975 revolution, Eleni left her beloved country with her family once again. It would take her almost 30 years before she returns back to her birth country.

Her discoveries

Growing up, the privilege of being able to visit her father’s UN development projects got her thinking about poverty. That is how her urge came to “help lift Africa out of poverty”. In order to fulfill her dream, she identified Economics as her doorway. After boarding high school in Kenya, Eleni was admitted to Cornell University, where she earned a Bachelor Arts in Economics.

In her senior year, Eleni was admitted to a one-year program at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Cornell, and was given an internship at the UN in Geneva. Her grad school specialization in international trade and her interest in domestic markets and in particular New Institutional Economics (how people connect, how they interact in the market, and the costs of transacting) all fueled her obsession with transaction cost economics and commodity exchanges. She then continued her childhood plans towards a PhD, and was accepted in a department with “the world’s commodity exchange experts” at Stanford University.

Eleni’s involvement in Ethiopia started in 1995 when she began working on her PhD thesis through a Rockefeller grant to study grain marketing.

While doing background research on the market, “I stumbled on brokers,” she said with a look of surprise on her face. “Nowhere in the world had I come across brokers who played such a key role” she smiled.

“The brokerage system was basically the traditional commodity exchange in Ethiopia.”

Her dissertation analyzed the positive aspect of these brokers in their engagements with traders and farmers. “This institution needed to be formalized and better understood,” she advised. Indeed her thesis won her a national award in 1999 as the year’s Outstanding Dissertation from the American Agricultural Economics Association. Eleni’s thesis was later transformed into a book and published as a research document by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), where she was later employed.

Her Breakthrough

“A food security crisis hit Ethiopia in mid 2002. Just before that, prices had collapsed because the harvest was good in 2001-2002.” The dramatic switch from food surplus and price collapse to food shortage and hunger was a signal of the failure of the marketing system. Eleni went to Ethiopia for an international conference the same year and gave a presentation on how it was time to “urgently fix the marketing problem.” This conference was attended by high level government officials who were concerned about the rural development strategy and her involvement on the marketing policy reforms continued from then on, from her base in Washington, D.C.

In 2004, while working for the World Bank, she accepted an assignment from IFPRI to move to Ethiopia to set up and lead a country program to establish a policy analysis unit working with various researchers and government bodies. As part of that program, she initiated her long-held dream, to establish the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). The project to design the exchange started in 2006. When the exchange became operational in April 2008, Eleni made the move to a new position as its Chief Executive Officer.

Below is a link for a presentation Eleni gave at Ted Africa regarding ECX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZwNaaJxw40&feature=related

Challenges or Not

Many of us women face challenges when climbing the high stairs of work, education or even domestic life, mainly because of the societal perceptions of women. It was nothing like that with Eleni. "I have never thought about how my life in this area would have turned out if I were a man. I do not dwell on that at all” she beamed. Stating that this is probably the most challenging and exciting thing she’s ever done, Eleni feels that she’s maybe even been in the advantage as a woman.

What is more important is her confidence and self-esteem coming from the love of her parents, the incredible example of a strong woman that her mother is, and the fact that Eleni grew up in different cultures and met a lot of people who helped her to be comfortable in different cultural settings. “I read a lot, and in my research years, I interviewed traders all over the world”, Eleni states, confirming that this gives her confidence in ‘”knowing well what she talks about’ with government officials”.

As complex as the field of commodity exchange is, spanning IT, law, finance, and trading, Eleni feels that “women are excellent in multi-tasking” and takes on the challenge.

Yet, Eleni, a mother of two boys, agrees that in general ‘Economics’ and ‘Trade’ are male-dominated areas and that there have been plenty of challenges and stress along the way.

Thumbs Up

In her last words to women, Eleni insists that, “We should always start with a dream, and that dream should be big. Women should get what they want. Never stop believing in yourself and your dream. Surround yourself with positive spirits, there are too many people who will tell you it can’t be done. Have a vision, a plan, and go for it; but also be willing to change and grow with it”. And that is what Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin did.

Luladay Aragaw is the Ethiopia Bureau Chief for The Ethiopian American.

Source: Ethiopian American