Anthony Okara holds the position of Project Coordinator. He is a lawyer, diplomat and international civil servant. He has been involved in multilateral engagements and public sector reforms for almost 2 decades in Kenya, East Africa and on the African continent at large. He is currently an ALMA Special Ambassador and Special Advisor to ECES on the Kenya Pro-Peace Project. The Leaders’ Alliance on malaria is working with 47 African countries and 5 regional groupings as they march towards ending malaria on the continent by 2030. Anthony is working directly with the East African Community, IGAD, ECCAS and the AU by promoting their agenda, developing scorecards and mobilizing resources to support their malaria activities.
At the African Union, he was the Deputy Chief of Staff at the Bureau of the Commission’s Deputy Chairperson. As Head of Cabinet, he was pivotal in the Deputy Chairperson’s top priority of capacity building and extensive institutional reforms at the African Union. He was deeply involved in the development and implementation of the new AU Staff Regulations and Rules as well as the new Financial Rules and Regulations. He promoted the introduction of results-based management, programming and budgeting, waste reduction and a radical improvement of the ICT infrastructure at the AU Commission.
The reforms process contributed to the building of strong systems and methods. He helped guide the introduction of world-class accounting and reporting systems, new administrative policies towards better governance at the AU.
Before joining the AU, he acted as a legal counsel for the state in various engagements and fora over a period that spanned more than a decade. He was one of a team of four that drafted the first East African Community Treaty (1997), served as rapporteur for the preparation of the comprehensive review of the Constitution of Kenya, served in the team that implemented the Public Procurement reforms in Kenya (1998-2001), advised on the establishment of the Productivity Centre of Kenya.
He would later become a key aide to the Attorney General and later Minister for Justice in Kenya, in which role, he was actively involved in the Legal Sector Reforms and the Governance, Justice, Law and Order Sector Reform. This is where he drew his first critical lessons in public sector reforms on stakeholder participation and political sensitivities.
Anthony holds a Bachelor of Laws degree and is currently writing his thesis to complete a Master of Arts degree in International Studies at the University of Nairobi. In 2007, he spent one year at the National Defence College in Nairobi and completed a course on statecraft and national security.
