Hannah Tsadik

Hannah Tsadik has over 15 years of diverse, hands-on programming and policy experience in Africa. She joined the Mastercard Foundation in 2021 and is the Acting Country Director for Kenya. Hannah is leading the implementation of the Kenya Country Roadmap, providing collaborative leadership to the team, and working with partners to enable work opportunities for young Kenyan women and men.

Hannah is also the Senior Director of Policy and Thought Leadership at Mastercard Foundation. She leads the Foundation’s overarching efforts to influence action with and for young people’s access to dignified and fulfilling work. She has been particularly instrumental in ensuring that young people’s perspectives are consistently centred in our thought leadership efforts – in convenings, critical policy dialogues and through direct support to Youth-Led Organizations.

Previously, Hannah served in leadership positions in institutions such as the Open Society Foundations in Kenya and the Life & Peace Institute in Ethiopia and Kenya, working on peacebuilding, inclusive governance, and development issues. Among her proudest contributions was spearheading a youth peace dialogue initiative with Life & Peace Institute with 35 young people in Ethiopia, which mobilized tens of thousands of university students across the country over a decade and subsequently spread to Sudan, Somalia, and Kenya. In her regional role with Life & Peace Institute, she led a coalition of diverse actors to design a regional policy framework to improve conditions for informal cross-border traders in the Horn of Africa, many of them young women, which was successfully adopted in 2018 by all member states in the sub-region.

She holds a BA in Political Science from North Park University, U.S.A. and an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University, Sweden. For her contributions to global development, Hannah received the Swedish Annual Forum for Development Prize in 2017.