The team

Chair of the Supervisory Board, Investing for Peace Foundation

Ambassador Bleinroth is the Ambassador at Large for Peace Impact Investing at the German Federal Foreign Office. He has spent three decades as a German career diplomat. Most recently he directed the Strategy and Policy Division in the Federal Foreign Office’s Directorate for Crisis Prevention, Stabilisation, Peacebuilding and Humanitarian Assistance. In that role he shaped Germany’s policy framework for engagement in fragile and conflict-affected settings, including financing for peace and investment in fragile states.

He has been closely involved in Germany’s bilateral and multilateral peacebuilding initiatives, working alongside the UN Peacebuilding Fund, EU instruments and development finance institutions. Earlier he led the Foreign Office’s Division for Conventional Disarmament and served as Deputy Permanent Representative to the OSCE in Vienna, negotiating arms control and confidence-building measures.

His postings span Vienna, Beijing, Brussels and Washington DC, with secondments to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Executive Office at the IMF. That combination of security policy, multilateral negotiation and economic and financial experience underpins his role as Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Investing for Peace Foundation.

Member of the Supervisory Board, Investing for Peace Foundation

Hajer Sharief is a Libyan peace and human rights advocate who co-founded Together We Build It in 2011, at the age of 17, in direct response to the Libyan civil war. She built it into a nationally recognised organisation working across western, eastern and southern Libya on women, peace and security, youth empowerment, prevention of gender-based violence and human rights reporting.

She founded Libya’s 1325 Network, linking more than 22 civil society organisations and 50 activists across 30 cities to advance UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and led advocacy for a Libyan national action plan. In January 2018 she became the first Libyan woman to brief the UN Security Council in a country-specific session, arguing for the inclusion of women and young people in the UN-led peace process.

She serves on the Advisory Board of the Executive Director of UN Women and was appointed by the UN Secretary-General to the advisory group for the progress study on Youth, Peace and Security under Resolution 2250. Selected by Kofi Annan for the Extremely Together initiative, named among Forbes’ 50 Most Powerful Women in Africa and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she brings frontline legitimacy and a conflict-affected community perspective to the Foundation’s governance.

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Member of the Supervisory Board, Investing for Peace Foundation

Baso Sangqu is a South African diplomat and corporate executive whose career has centred on peace and security. He served as South Africa’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2009 to 2012, a period in which the country held a non-permanent seat on the Security Council, and he presided over the Council in January 2012.

In November 2024 the UN Secretary-General appointed him to the Eighth Advisory Group of the UN Peacebuilding Fund, one of twelve independent experts guiding the allocation and strategy of the UN’s financial instrument of first resort for countries at risk of or affected by violent conflict. He previously served as South Africa’s Ambassador to the African Union in Addis Ababa and as Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union, consistently championing African-led approaches to peace and the UN–AU partnership.

Since 2019 he has been Senior Vice President for Group Sustainability at AngloGold Ashanti, leading sustainability strategy and governance across global operations and managing government, community and regulatory relationships in complex jurisdictions. That blend of multilateral diplomacy and private sector leadership is directly relevant to mobilising investment in fragile settings.

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Member of the Supervisory Board, Investing for Peace Foundation

David Kuijper is Chief Executive of EDFI, the Brussels-based association of 26 European bilateral development finance institutions, which he has led since September 2023. He drives EDFI’s agenda on blended finance, climate investment and private sector mobilisation, and represents European DFIs in dialogue with the European Commission, multilateral development banks and development policy stakeholders.

Before EDFI he spent five years at FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, as Manager for Public Investment and Blended Finance. There he structured and deployed concessional capital alongside commercial finance to crowd private investment into emerging and frontier markets, managing the donor relationships — the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Commission and other bilateral partners — that underwrite such facilities.

Earlier he advised on financing for development at the World Bank in Washington DC and served as a Dutch diplomat with postings across Africa, South Asia and the United States. Thirty years spanning public investment, blended finance and diplomacy give him a practical view of how concessional and commercial capital can be combined to invest in fragile and conflict-affected states.

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Chief Executive and Chair of the Management Board

Pierre has over 30 years’ experience in development finance, investment banking and consulting, including with British International Investment (BII), McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs, and he has lived and worked in fragile environments including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Northern Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan and Zimbabwe.

He was instrumental in the establishment and scaling of pioneering impact investment platforms in Africa: AgDevCo, an agribusiness investment platform with $300 million in assets under management; and the African Forestry Impact Platform (AFIP), an Africa-focused forestry investment platform with $200m under management, managed by New Forests. As former Head of Frontier Investments he was responsible for BII’s investments in fragile states. He also served on the Board of the EDFI Management Company, an impact-driven financial services provider established in collaboration with the European Development Finance Institutions.

Previously, he was the founder of the first private equity fund in Afghanistan in 2006 and CEO of a logistics business in Nigeria, and for 10 years a Board Member of TechnoServe Europe. He started his career in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and with McKinsey & Company in London. In the early 1990s he worked as a journalist during the civil wars in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda and had a stint in the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations under Kofi Annan.

Dr Van Hoeylandt holds a D.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and studied at the Freie Universität Berlin as well as New York University. He is based with his family in South Africa.

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Investment Director

Corine Franken is an investment professional with more than 17 years in impact investing and portfolio management across energy, financial institutions and infrastructure. She has invested some EUR 330 million across around 30 transactions, the majority as lead investor or mandated lead arranger.

She spent twelve years at FMO, the Dutch development bank, working in structured finance for financial institutions, energy project finance and the Ventures Program, where she led equity and debt investments in off-grid and distributed energy across the Sahel, West Africa and East Africa, including first-of-their-kind independent power projects and metro-grid operators.

More recently she was Senior Investment Manager in Invest-NL’s energy venture team, investing tickets of EUR 5 to 50 million, and a founding partner of Tidal, a EUR 75 million offshore, maritime and ports fund at Ninepointfive. She is a partner at ROER Renewables and owner of Energy Haven, and has acted as commercial due diligence lead on transactions carrying high environmental and social risk.

She served on the supervisory board of ZIZ Energie in Chad and as board observer at SolarDuck, SolarX, Husk Power Systems and Easy Solar, and began her career at Nomura, the World Bank and Financial Access Capital Partners.

She holds an MSc in International Financial Economics from the University of Amsterdam, where she also studied sustainable development, and completed executive training at INCAE Business School on renewable energy project development in Latin America.

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Investment Director (seconded from CrossBoundary)

Mo Habib is a Principal at CrossBoundary, the investment firm focused on unlocking capital in emerging markets, with more than 220 investment professionals across 24 offices and a transaction advisory record exceeding $8 billion across 75 countries. Based in Dubai, he leads transaction advisory mandates across Africa and the Middle East and has been promoted through four levels since joining in 2021.

He is a founding team member of Dhow Ventures, CrossBoundary’s first global emerging markets venture fund, contributing to a successful first and second close and leading due diligence on seven investments across Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa in fintech, mobility and food technology. Before CrossBoundary he spent three years at AgDevCo in Nairobi, deploying debt, mezzanine and equity capital across the agricultural value chain in East Africa.

A CFA charterholder who passed all three levels within two years and a chartered accountant (ACCA), he combines investment discipline with frontier-market execution experience. Fluent in English, Swahili, Kutchi and Hindi, he is seconded to Investing for Peace as Investment Director.

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Peace Impact and ESG Director

At I4P, Karin works within the investment team: peace, impact and ESG considerations are built into how each investment is originated, assessed and structured, rather than reviewed alongside them.

Karin Verstralen is an impact, ESG and human rights specialist who spent much of her career at FMO, the Dutch development bank. As part of FMO’s Impact and ESG management team she was responsible for implementing and developing the bank’s impact and ESG ambition across sectors, and led its business and human rights agenda.

She previously served as Environmental and Social Manager for FMO’s energy department and as a senior social specialist, leading some of the bank’s most complex and innovative transactions in high social and human rights risk settings. She helped shape the environmental, social and human rights due diligence, structuring and monitoring processes that FMO and its lender groups still use, working with companies and fund managers across energy, infrastructure, large-scale agriculture, forestry and mining.

She later advised FMO’s investment committee on impact, ESG and human rights, served as an expert board member of the Althelia Climate Fund at Mirova, and led impact and ESG for The Demeter Initiative, alongside her own advisory practice, KRIN Consulting. Her earlier field experience includes rural development and stakeholder engagement work and a posting with FAO in Zambia — grounding for measuring and safeguarding peace impact in fragile markets.

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Operations Manager

Prosper Mangwiro is Operations Manager at Investing for Peace, responsible for the systems, controls and reporting behind the platform’s work in fragile and conflict-affected states. He advises the Chief Executive and the Boards on governance, compliance, financial administration, and reporting to boards, donors and investors.

He joined I4P from Africa50, where he led development of its Data and AI, healthcare and Infrastructure Acceleration Fund origination strategies. Before that he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, building the models behind a growth strategy on a $3 billion turnover and allocating $500 million of philanthropic funding across four continents. He began his career at J.P. Morgan in New York.

Over six years at the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Harare he secured $260 million in malaria funding from the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation and modelled $1.1 billion in savings for the national HIV programme. He also costed the World Health Organization’s 2026 to 2028 malaria operational plan. He holds an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. That combination of financial rigour and delivery in constrained markets is what an investment platform in fragile states runs on.

General Counsel

Robyn Bandey is a specialist energy, project finance and banking lawyer with 15 years of experience across South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Through Bandey Legal Consulting, which she has led since 2018, she advises on project and trade finance, energy law, debt restructuring and cross-border corporate transactions.

She has advised extensively on South Africa’s renewable energy procurement programme, supporting bidders including ENGIE through REIPPP bid windows five and six, and acts as legal adviser to the City of Cape Town on its independent power producer programmes — drafting power purchase agreements, reviewing tender documentation and advising on preferred bidder selection.

Her fund work is directly relevant to the Foundation’s platform: she has advised Africa-focused alternative investment funds Alteia Fund Management and Barak Fund Management on fund-level trade finance agreements, security documentation and in-country execution across Zimbabwe, Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique and Côte d’Ivoire, combining legal rigour with a commercial, solutions-oriented approach.