Runa Alam
Co-Founder & Chair| Development Partners International (DPI)
Runa Alam is the co-founder, with Miles Morland, of Development Partners International (“DPI”). After nearly two decades as the founding CEO of DPI, on April 1st Ms Alam became the Chair of DPI.
DPI is a leading private equity firm investing throughout Africa, and manages over $4 billion in five funds, African Development Partners I (“ADP I”), ADP II, ADP III and ADP IV, along with the Nclude Venture Capital fund. ADP I and ADP II are Cambridge benchmarked top quartile Africa funds. The ADP funds have won numerous awards and been commended both for delivering top returns to investors while delivering top levels of ES&G and impact work. DPI is a gender balanced firm and seeks to focus its impact work on four buckets: Gender Balance, Climate Change, Job Creation and Enhancement, and Financial Inclusion. ADP III also been chosen as the first “2X Challenge Gender Balance Showcase fund” by the OECD country development institutions. Under this initiative DPI made more than 55% of its ADP funds’ companies “gender balanced.”
Ms Alam has decades of private equity, emerging market management and investment banking experience. She has invested in African private capital for 28 years. She has served on the Boards of many African companies. She has contributed to the development of private equity in Africa as a former Chair of AVCA (the African Private Equity Association), Founding Chair of the AVCA Sustainability Committee, and a Vice Chair and Africa Council Member of EMPEA (the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association). Ms. Alam is also on the board of CARE, and on a Future Challenge Committee of the World Economic Forum on “Investing with the UN SDGs.”
Ms. Alam has contributed to efforts in education and development through her written and pro bono work. She sat on the advisory committees at Princeton and Yale Universities and was formerly an Advisory Council member of MIDA (Mobilizing Institutional Investors to Develop Africa’s Infrastructure), NASP-USAID Investment Partnership, and USAID’s Private Sector Partners Committee, and committees at the World Economic Forum.
Ms. Alam started her career on Wall Street working for Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. She is a development economist and is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School. She is a Harry S. Truman Congressional Scholar.
