Emeka Orjih

Advisor to the Sustainability for Impact Working Group

Currently the SeniorTechnical Advisor to the Hon. Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology of Nigeria, Emeka Orjih is a Financial 8& Development Strategist with 29 years experience in Finance, Venture Capitalism, Strategy Crafting & Execution, ICT, Enterprise Development and Management Consulting, spanning the International Development sector, the Public & Private Sectors, across 14 countries on the 3 continents of Africa, Asia and North America.
He has worked for the World Bank in Washington DC and in 4 Asian countries; and for the US Government Agency, SBA (Small Business Administration) in the Philadelphia region of the US. He was Assistant Country Director of the only US Government Agency dedicated to building SMEs in Africa, USADF (United States African Development Foundation). He was also Managing Director of the largest CSR Platform in Nigeria that raised and deployed $31 million (thirty one million USD) into Enterprise Development for blue chip companies that include NLNG, Mobil and MTN. For MTN particularly, he led execution of the GSMA award-winning "Phone Ladies" project which created 8,000 female owned enterprises across 34 states of Nigeria in its phase 1.
Emeka has built and supported over 18,000 (eighteen thousand) innovative SMEs in the US and in the 5 African countries of Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Uganda and Angola. He has worked in Strategy Consulting for organizations that include the UN, European Union (EU), UK Government's DFID, Canadian Government's CIDA, and Fortune 500 companies BMS, Microsoft, General Electric and IBM. He crafted the 20 year strategic development plan for Abuja Technology Village (ATV), which is touted as Nigeria's Silicon Valley. He also crafted the strategic plans for the development of Nigeria's e-agric and e-health platforms.

He was previously Country Managing Partner at Wharton Consulting, an international Strategy Consulting Firm that provides Advisory Services to Development Finance Institutions (DFls), International Development organizations, and Public Sector regulators in Africa. His last role was Founder and Chief Strategist of Nest ONE - a Business Incubation Hub focused on incubating and funding scalable female-owned tech-driven enterprises in the Agro and Creative spaces of Nigeria.
Emeka's core career interest is the mobilization of the competencies & resources of the International Development Sector, the Public & Private Sectors to build innovative platforms that solve intractable social problems in Africa particularly, poverty.

He has been key in providing advise to the Trustees and SIWG on local, national or transnational financing which are drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions that will address climate change. He has thus been providing policy briefing and strategic positioning, building on the calls from the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement for financial assistance from Parties with more financial resources to those that are less endowed and more vulnerable, while exploring how best to unlock Africa’s private sector action and finance for climate. He has assesd and designed possible frameworks for integration of climate technologies that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions as he highlighted above.

Emeka is also currently working on supporting the Nigerian government on meeting the EUDR exercise (EU Deforestation Regulations) along with international donor agencies and private sector actors like PULA, to achieve the mandate of:
1. ensuring Nigerian cash crop exports to the EU can be traced to source
2. Complete polygon mapping exercises of all farms and farmers involved in production of listed EU bound export products
3. This exercise is due to be completed by Dec 2024

He holds an MBA in Strategic Management from the world's first business school, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA. While at Wharton, he was Selected as Face of Wharton Class of 2004 ahead of 820 classmates. Akin to a Model Student Award, the selected person appears on school brochures and publicity materials. He was also the Winner of "Most insightful Comments In Class" and a first runner-up in "Most Likely to Change the World" categories in a vote organized by fellow MBA students as part of graduation activities