Olumide Abimbola is founder and director of APRI. His areas of focus include economic informality, trade policy, regional integration and natural resources management. He has either conducted research or worked in Tunisia, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo and Nigeria. He has also worked with high-level government officials in several other African countries. 

Before APRI, he worked at the CONNEX Support Unit, a GIZ-hosted G7 initiative funded by the German government and the European Commission. Before that, he worked on trade and regional integration at the African Development Bank, working on continental projects such as the Africa Visa Openness Index and the Africa Regional Integration Index, a collaboration between the AfDB, African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. He also coordinated work on non-tariff measures in partnership with the International Trade Centre and UNCTAD. 

Olumide has been published on different academic, policy and media platforms. He was recently co-author of a framing paper on climate and racial justice. He also co-authored “Running the Numbers: Use of Financial Models for Extractive Projects in Africa”, a study of how African governments manage natural resources through financial modelling. While at the AfDB, he contributed to the Guidebook on African Commodity and Derivatives Exchange and the Energy Sector Capacity Building Diagnostic & Needs Assessment Study. 

Olumide did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. He also has a master’s degree in Development Studies from Uppsala University, Sweden and a bachelor’s in communication studies from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and has taught graduate-level courses in German universities. 

Olumide currently sits on the International Board of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine, and is Member, Policy Working Group, at the Institute of Humanities in Africa (HUMA) of the University of Cape Town. As a PhD student, he co-founded NigeriansTalk, a forum for Nigerian opinion and analysis.