Mark Ampah

Mark Ampah worked for the IFC, first as the Project Manager (PM)/Chief of Party) for the Enterprise Support Services for Africa (ESSA), a project jointly funded by the IFC of the World Bank Group and CIDA, based in Accra, Ghana. Mark exercised complete responsibility for the day-to-day management of millions of dollars to provide Business Development Services (BDS) to build the entrepreneurial capacity of over 100 SMEs to help them to grow and create jobs. Prior to that, Mark worked as a Corporate Banker with the TD Bank in Canada, An Executive Consultant with the George S. May Company, based in Chicago, and undertook several business consulting assignments throughout Canada and the North-Eastern United States. Mark later worked as an Operations Officer/Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist-Sub Saharan Africa for the Africa Project Development Facility (APDF) a facility of the IFC. He worked with SMEs throughout sub-Saharan Africa to prepare bankable business plans to raise financing for their investment projects. He also worked as the Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for the facility’s 100+ projects. He developed best practice systems, methodologies, and tools that helped to make APDF an efficient BDS provider. Mark undertook comprehensive mid-term and end-of-project evaluations of all APDF’s activities in Sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate the impact of the facility on IFC/APDF Management, our donor clients, and other stakeholders. More recently, Mark worked as the Regional Head, Results Measurement Specialist for the Private Enterprise Partnership Africa (PEP Africa) for the Sub-Saharan Region, and Senior Results Measurement Specialist for Public Private Partnership Advisory Services for IFC Africa. He recruited and supervised M&E staff to manage an M&E system that monitored, evaluated, and reported on over 200 programs – in over 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Projects included activities to improve a) Access to Finance for MSMEs - Microfinance, SME banking, Micro-insurance, leasing, credit bureaus, etc.; b) Access to education, health, sustainable farming, ICT, climate change/renewable resource use, and c) Public Private Partnership Advisory Services in Infrastructure projects including the construction of ports, hydroelectric projects, the management of electricity infrastructure, construction of hospitals and health centers, educational infrastructure, roads and railways, waste management, telecommunications infrastructure, etc. Mark’s role included the design of projects, project supervision to completion, and post-completion follow-up activities to ensure that they deliver the results and impact that they are supposed to deliver 3-10 years post-completion. In the past few years, Mark has worked with various international consortia of consulting firms to undertake evaluation in various projects including, as the Evaluation/Financial Analyst on the ongoing Alliance for a Green Revolution in Ghana- Economic Impact Assessment Services for Agribusiness Reforms in Ghana; as Evaluation lead in the USAID/Ghana Partnership for Growth in Ghana, as Finance and Investment lead in the evaluation of the East Africa Trade and Investment Hub, another USAID project; as Lead Evaluator for the evaluation of the Africa Union’s Gender Policy and several other assignments as shown in his CV. His responsibilities include; a) the quantification of the overall impact of the proposed projects; b) the determination of the overall impact, including all significant effects both positive and negative; and c) the quantification of the impact of projects on stakeholders including findings, conclusions, recommendations and lessons learned that would help improve the design and implementation of similar projects in the future. Mark holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics from the University of Guelph and an MBA from the University of Western Ontario. He also has Certificates in Development Evaluation core Monitoring Evaluation and specialization in Sampling Techniques for Development Evaluation and Assessing Organizational Performance in addition to several academic and job performance awards.