(PRESS RELEASE) OTTAWA — The Diamond Development Initiative announces the appointment of Ian Rowe as its new executive director, with effect from September 2, 2019. His appointment follows the impending departure of Dorothée Gizenga, who as DDI’s founding ED has provided leadership and inspiration for more than a decade, and who will now take on a new role as regional director to lead DDI’s expansion in Africa. She’ll be based in Kinshasa, DRC.
DDI’s Deputy ED since September 2018, Ian Rowe brings two decades of experience in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean where he has worked with civil society organizations and United Nations agencies in the areas of development, socio-economic recovery and conflict prevention. He has held senior UN management positions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti, and has worked in a variety of staff and consulting positions in Kenya, Somalia, Burundi and Bolivia. In 2008 he served on a UN Panel of Experts on the Sudan, investigating violations of the arms embargo on Darfur. Prior to joining DDI, he served as director of the disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, reintegration and resettlement division within the UN Stabilization Mission in Congo (MONUSCO). Based out of Goma he held responsibility for managing 14 regional offices in support of the government-led disarmament, demobilization and reintegration process.
As deputy executive director of DDI, he has managed our field operations in Sierra Leone and has led a six-month strategic planning process to position DDI for a future in which artisanal mining is expected to become a much more prominent development challenge. As a result DDI is now poised to consolidate many of the important lessons it has learned into larger, cross-cutting programs with positive outcomes for the artisanal mining sector.
“Artisanal miners are at the wellhead of the diamond pipeline,” says Ian Rowe. “Bringing them into the formal diamond economy benefits them, their communities and the industry as a whole. Scaling up what we have learned about the process is the task ahead.”
Ian holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton University in French and Spanish, and a Master’s degree in international conflict analysis from the University of Kent.