Dr. Omar Alieu Touray is the President of the ECOWAS Commission.
He was appointed by the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government during the Sixty-First Ordinary Session of the Authority in Accra, Ghana, on July 03, 2022 to serve for a four-year term. Dr Touray is a Gambian diplomat and development professional. For several years, he was Ambassador and Permanent Representative of The Gambia to the African Union and Ambassador to Ethiopia with concurrent accreditation as High Commissioner to South Africa and Kenya. He had been Permanent Representative Designate to the United Nations in New York before he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. He also worked as Regional Policy Advisor at the Regional Bureau for East and Central Africa (ODN) of the United Nations World Food Programme, and as consultant for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, United Nations Development Programme Gambia Country Office and the Commission of the African Union. Dr. Touray worked at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, since 2012 before his appointment as the President of the ECOWAS Commission.
President Touray holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, University of Geneva. He also studied Finance and Islamic Finance at IE Business School in Madrid. He is the author of peer-reviewed books: The African Union: The First Ten Years (Lanham, New York and London, Rowman and Littlefield 2016); The Gambia and the World: A History of the Foreign Policy of Africa’s Smallest State (Hamburg African Studies Series, 2000) and several papers on international development and African Affairs. In addition to English, Dr. Touray speaks French and Arabic.
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