CAMFED International Board - Member
Maidie Arkutu is currently the Senior Franchise Director, Algeria & Tunisia at Coca Cola Company. Prior to that, she was Senior Vice President, New Business Development, and Innovations for Caraway Africa Nigeria (Olam & Sanyo JV). In this role, she was responsible for new product development for the snacks category and for geographic expansion.
Ms. Arkutu is also the past Vice President, Chairman and Managing Director of Unilever Francophone Africa. In this role, she led one of the four sub-Saharan African clusters for the Unilever Africa Group, managing over 10 French speaking countries and based in Abidjan. She was the Managing Director of Unilever Ghana prior to taking on the Francophone role. She held senior marketing roles across different African countries in her formative years with Unilever and the Coca-Cola Company.
A professional Marketer, Transformational Leader and International Executive, Ms. Arkutu has a Post- Graduate Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (U.K. Board). She also holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in Business Economics with a minor in French, from Vesalius College, Belgium.
Ms. Arkutu is currently a Non-Executive Board Member of GT Bank and Axis Pensions Group. At United Way Worldwide, she is a Member of the Leadership Council and the African Advisory Council. Ms. Arkutu is also a Stanford Seed Consultant, a role in which she volunteers to give free professional advice to small and medium size businesses in Africa.
Previous governance roles include: Lady Chair and Executive Board Member of the Executive Women Network (EWN), Non- Executive Board member at Barclays Bank Ghana Limited, Executive Board Member at Unilever Ghana Limited, Board Chair and Executive Board Member of Unilever Francophone Africa, Steering Committee Member of the Skills Development Fund, Member of the BEEP Advisory Council and Corporate Advisory Group Member of the University of Ghana Business School.
Ms. Arkutu has been the recipient of several awards and recognitions, including the prestigious Marketing Woman of the Year (2015) at the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana Awards and Outstanding Manufacturing Executive, Personal Products (2016) at the Feminine Ghana Achievement Awards. In 2017 she was awarded the Female Influential Leader Award by Ghana UK Based Achievements (GUBA), and Most Influential Woman in Business and Government in Ivory Coast and the West Africa sub-region by CEO Global. In 2018, the prestigious Jeune Afrique Magazine/ Africa Report Magazine named Ms. Arkutu as one of the Top 50 Most Influential Women in Business in Africa.