FRANCIS OSEI
Independent
Trainer
Francis Osei is the managing consultant for IESO Agribusiness Consult with over 25 years’ experience in the agribusiness sector, specifically in project design and management, agricultural investment appraisal, agricultural banking and financing, and food and agro-processing industry.
Throughout his career, Francis has been involved in extensive business interactions with both the private and public sectors in the design, monitoring and evaluation of agricultural sector projects. He has also been instrumental in the financing of several agribusiness projects and initiatives worth over $500 million across Africa. He has led different banks to finance various agricultural value chains including cocoa, cashew, coffee, shea nuts, maize, soya beans, sorghum, groundnuts, cowpeas, poultry, and aquaculture (tilapia), among others.
At IESO, Francis has been instrumental in the design of agricultural sector programs across the continent, some of which are of key national and regional strategic significance. Some of these include leading the Design of the Rwandan Agricultural Risk Sharing and Financing Facility, and as a sub-contractor of PWC, assisting in the Design of the Ghana Incentive-based Risk-sharing Scheme for Agricultural Lending (GIRSAL).
Before founding IESO Agribusiness Consult, Francis was regional manager (Agribusiness Development) of Millennium Promise, Millennium Development Goals Center, Dakar, Senegal, where he was responsible for strategy development for West and Central Africa. Before that, he was also head of Agricultural Banking at Stanbic Bank Ghana Limited, a member of the Standard Bank Group, where he developed and drove the agricultural/agribusiness segment strategy and value propositions for the bank in Ghana.
During his tenure as a regional business development manager for Millennium Promise, he played a key role in assisting over 30,000 farmers in food and cash crop production, gain access to commercial credit in seven project sites in Ghana, Nigeria, Mali and Senegal. Francis has also been involved in the management of several multi-million multilateral and bilateral donor projects for rural and agriculture financing for smallholder farmers affecting more than 80,000 Ghanaian farmers in the various crop value chains since 2001.
Francis is a distinguished alumnus of the Harvard Agribusiness Seminar Program of the Harvard Business School (2013). He also holds an MBA from the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), an M.Phil. (Food Science) from the University of Ghana and BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry from the University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He is a member of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Association (IFAMA) as well as a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK.
Francis has been involved in the training of bankers in Ghana and West Africa in agricultural lending and related issues.