Teresa Hillary Clarke (born February 8, 1963), is a prominent
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
investment banker, entrepreneur, and expert on
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
. Her career has spanned a wide range, from being a managing director at Goldman Sachs to co-founding a scholarship and mentoring non-profit,
Student Sponsorship Programme in
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...
. Over the last several years, she has funded and led ''Africa.com''.
Growing up in California, Teresa H. Clarke descends from a line of prominent women, including her mother and grandmother who were both alumni of Howard University and went on to successful careers in education and community service. Her mother, Dr. Audrey Clarke, retired after serving for ten years as the superintendent of schools in Lynwood, California and later became a professor at California State University at Northridge in the graduate school of education.
Her mother graduated from
Howard University
Howard University (Howard) is a private, federally chartered historically black research university in Washington, D.C. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity" and accredited by the Middle States Commissi ...
in 1958,
Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...
and ''magna cum laude'' and won a
Fulbright Scholarship
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
to the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina that same year. Her grandmother attended Howard as a member of the class of 1933. In honor of their Howard legacies, Dr. Audrey M. Clarke established the Audrey M. Clarke and Elvira F. Clarke Fellowship for International Learning at Howard University.
Clarke has a bachelor's degree in economics, ''cum laude'', from Harvard College (1980–1984), an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School (1989) and a
J.D. from Harvard Law School (1989). She has served on the boards of Southern Africa Legal Services (Legal Resource Centre), the
Tony Elumelu Foundation, the Opportunity Agenda, serves on the board of the Student Sponsorship Programme South Africa and is an emeriti board member of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association.
Clarke is fluent in Spanish, French and Portuguese and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has received numerous awards for her work in Africa, including the Government of South Africa's Freedom Day Award, the Education Africa's Humanitarian Award for Africa, the Merrill Lynch/Africa 2.0 Business Leadership Award, the
International Women's Society Humanitarian of the Year Award, the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Educational Leadership Award, and the Girl Scouts of Connecticut Woman of Achievement. Clarke was named one of the top 25 Women in Business by the Network Journal.
In 2010,
Black Entertainment Television
Black Entertainment Television (acronym BET) is an American basic cable channel targeting African-American audiences. It is owned by the CBS Entertainment Group unit of Paramount Global via BET Networks and has offices in New York City, Los ...
honored Clarke and won the Shot Caller Award on their internationally televised awards show Black Girls Rock!
Background
In August 1989, Teresa Clarke joined the real-estate department at Goldman Sachs & Co. in New York as an associate. She worked in the investment banking division for six years before leaving to found and serve as managing director of the South African office of Abt Associates, the Cambridge (Mass.) public-policy & management consulting firm. Her clients in South Africa included companies such as Transnet (holding company of South African Airways), Johnson & Johnson, and institutions involved in the coordination of the education and public health development sectors.
Teresa Clarke lived in South Africa from 1995 to 2000. During her time in South Africa, Clarke also taught corporate finance in the MBA program at Wits Business School.
In 1999, she co-founded Student Sponsorship Programme South Africa. SSP provides academically talented but economically disadvantaged South African students with scholarships and support to attend private schools. The non-profit trust program based in Johannesburg has provided more than $10 million in scholarships to more than 1000 children. Some 90 percent of the students complete the program. About 90 percent of SSP's graduates qualify to attend university. For her work with SSP ZA, Clarke has been recognized by the South African government, among many others.
From 2004 to 2010, Clarke returned to Goldman Sachs. Her first contribution was to play a key role in launching the firm's Global Markets Institute. She later moved back into the investment banking division where she led mergers and acquisitions, and corporate finance transactions for Fortune 500 companies in the US and Europe. She was also the manager of the GS Africa Aspen Program, a leadership development project for emerging public- and private-sector African leaders created in cooperation with the Aspen Institute.
Recent events
On February 12, 2010, Teresa Clarke ended a 12-year career at Goldman Sachs to focus on Africa.com, She launched Africa.com in February 2010, her goals for Africa.com were to change the way the world engages online with Africa and to be the platform for those changes, stating:
Clarke has been featured as an Africa expert at the
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...
in Africa and India, the
Milken Institute
The Milken Institute is an independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California with offices in Washington, DC, New York, Miami, London, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore. It publishes research and hosts conferences that apply market-based p ...
and the Fortune/Time/CNN Global Forum. In 2008, she received the Freedom Day Award from the South African Consulate. On November 4, 2010, Clarke was a speaker at African Leadership Network's inaugural ceremony. This event is the equivalent of the World Economic Forum in Davos but organized by and for Africans and people of African descent. She has also lectured at various institutes of higher learning, including
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
,
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
,
Princeton
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine ...
,
Yale
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...
,
Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...
,
Tufts
Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...
universities, and the
Wharton School
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in P ...
.
On November 7, 2010, Clarke was among the honorees being celebrated on Black Entertainment Television's (BET) event called Black Girls Rock!.
Clarke is the writer, producer and director of ''Africa Straight Up'', a 30-minute documentary made in partnership with
MTV Africa and
TEDTalks
TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...
that was released in 2012.
[
] While originally produced for online viewing, the film aired on the Africa Channel in the U.S. and UK, as well as on Dutch Television. It also was screened by
The White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in 1800. ...
, which had contributed to the film's production,
[ during the 2014 ]United States–Africa Leaders Summit
The United States–Africa Leaders Summit 2014 was an international summit held in Washington D.C. from August 4–6, 2014. Leaders from fifty African states attended the three-day summit, which was hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama. The summi ...
and by the Council on Foreign Relations and was shown as in-flight entertainment on South African Airways and Arik Airways.
In 2013, Clarke was invited to join The White House Traveling Press Corps and traveled with President Obama and his family to Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania. That same year she delivered a TEDx Talk at TEDxEuston in London, "The Diaspora Divide".
In 2014, she was featured on the Harvard Business School website in a video on Making a Difference. Her life story was also the subject of a profile celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Women at Harvard Business School. That year she was invited to the Fletcher Inclusive Business Summit. A summit at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, whose grounds have been preserved with the express mission to encourage pause and enable leaders from around the world to address the world's many complex needs.
In November 2014, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker
Penny Sue Pritzker (born May 2, 1959) is an American billionaire businesswoman and civic leader who served as the 38th United States secretary of commerce in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. She was confirmed by a Senate vote of 97†...
appointed Clarke and 14 other private sector leaders to the President Obama's Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa (PAC-DBIA). Its members were selected to advise the President, through the Secretary of Commerce, on strengthening commercial engagement between the United States and Africa.
In May 2020, she led the ''Africa.com'' Crisis Management for African Business Leaders webinar series entitled "Women are Proving to Be Great Leaders During COVID-19. Is this the Pathway to Power?", and its panel, which included former Deputy President of South Africa, Under Secretary of the United Nations and executive director of the UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (; born 3 November 1955), South African Government Information. is a South Africa, South African politician and former United Nations official, who served as the Executive Director of UN Women with the rank of Under-Secret ...
, Stanbic Bank Uganda CEO Anne Juuko, Oby Ezekwesili
Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili (born 28 April 1963) is an economic policy expert, an advocate for transparency, accountability, good governance and human capital development, a humanitarian and an activist. She is a former vice president for the Worl ...
of the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative, and Zambian youth activist and journalist Natasha Wang Mwansa, who is the youngest recipient of the WHO
Who or WHO may refer to:
* Who (pronoun), an interrogative or relative pronoun
* Who?, one of the Five Ws in journalism
* World Health Organization
Arts and entertainment Fictional characters
* Who, a creature in the Dr. Seuss book '' Horton He ...
Global Health Leaders award.
Personal life
Clarke has married twice. Her second marriage took place at Martha's Vineyard
Martha's Vineyard, often simply called the Vineyard, is an island in the Northeastern United States, located south of Cape Cod in Dukes County, Massachusetts, known for being a popular, affluent summer colony. Martha's Vineyard includes the s ...
on August 4, 2007, with Dr. John Edward Ellis, a professor of anesthesiology and critical care at the Pritzker School of Medicine
The Pritzker School of Medicine is the Doctor of Medicine, M.D.-granting unit of the Biological Sciences Division of the University of Chicago. It is located on the university's main campus in the historic Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighbo ...
at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
.
References
External links
Africa Straight Up - YouTube
Africa.com website
Student Sponsorship Programme website
HBSAAA Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Clarke, Teresa
Living people
1963 births
Harvard Business School alumni
Harvard Law School alumni
American women chief executives
21st-century American women
Fulbright alumni