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Charles Boamah
Title: Controller and Director
Company/Organization: African Development Bank
Program: African Graduate Fellowship Program (AFGRAD)
Degree: Master's in Business Administration
Year Completed: 1982
Charles O. Boamah, a Ghanaian native, is currently the Controller and a Director of the African Development Bank Group, the premier development finance institution in Africa. His responsibilities include oversight of all the activities of the ADB Group in the areas of financial accounting and reporting, monitoring of the effectiveness of the internal control framework, loan administration and related fiduciary responsibilities, including disbursements of funds to the projects and programs throughout Africa financed by the ADB Group. More recently, Mr. Boamah has overseen the implementation of the multilateral debt relief initiative for eligible African countries.
Since joining the ADB in 1996, Mr. Boamah has assumed a variety of responsibilities and also initiated, participated in or served as an executive sponsor to a number of Bank-wide initiatives. These include management of the budgeting and financial policy function, annual discussions with major international rating agencies, the Euro-readiness of the ADB Group, the senior management steering committee for the reorganization of the African Development Bank Group in 2001, and the development of a business continuity plan for the ADB, which was successfully implemented when the ADB had to temporarily relocate from Abidjan to Tunis in 2003. In addition to his controllership responsibilities, Mr. Boamah also successfully directed a multimillion-dollar multi-year Bank-wide ERP-enabled business innovation and change initiative between 1999 and 2002.
Mr. Boamah is appointed to and actively participates in the work of several Bank-wide committees, including the Asset/Liability Management Committee, the Information Systems Steering Committee, the Staff Retirement Plan, the Medical Plan Board, the Private Sector Investment Committee and the Senior Management Committee on Operations. In July 2004, Mr. Boamah was appointed to the Board of Directors of the African Export Import Bank (Afreximbank), a continental trade financing institution built on a model of public/private partnership.
Prior to joining the ADB, Boamah worked for 11 years with First Interstate Bank (merged with Wells Fargo Bank), starting as a Senior Financial Analyst and subsequently serving as Vice President and Manager of Accounting Policy and Research. Prior to First Interstate Bank, Mr. Boamah worked for over 5 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers (then Coopers & Lybrand) in Accra and Los Angeles, where he started as a staff accountant and was promoted to a supervisor. Mr. Boamah's clients included companies in the insurance, mortgage banking, retail, entertainment and manufacturing industries as well as city and county administrations.
Mr. Boamah earned a first-class honors degree in Business Administration from the University of Ghana. He also attended the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) through a scholarship from the AAI-administered African Graduate Fellowship Program (AFGRAD), where he earned a master's in business administration in finance. He also holds a CPA from the State of California.
Mr. Boamah is married with two children. His daughter, Afua, is currently attending college at Iowa State in the United States. Mr. Boamah currently lives with his wife, Captoria, and his son, Kofi, in Tunis, Tunisia, the temporary relocation site of the ADB Group's headquarters.