Pierre has over 30 years’ experience in development finance, investment banking and consulting, including with British International Investment (BII), McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs, and he has lived and worked in fragile environments including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Northern Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan and Zimbabwe.
He was instrumental in establishing and scaling pioneering impact investment platforms in Africa: AgDevCo, an agribusiness investment platform with $300 million in assets under management; and the African Forestry Impact Platform (AFIP), an Africa-focused forestry investment platform with $200m under management, managed by New Forests. As former Head of Frontier Investments, he was responsible for BII’s investments in fragile states. He also served on the Board of the EDFI Management Company, an impact-driven financial services provider established in collaboration with the European Development Finance Institutions.
Previously, he was the founder of the first private equity fund in Afghanistan in 2006 and CEO of a logistics business in Nigeria, and for 10 years a Board Member of TechnoServe Europe. He started his career in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and with McKinsey & Company in London. In the early 1990s, he worked as a journalist during the civil wars in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda and had a stint in the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations under Kofi Annan. Pierre holds a PhD in International Relations from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and studied at Freie Universität Berlin and New York University. He lives in South Africa with his family.
