A Charitable Organization for Basic Education & Child Nutrition 
14096 Eagle Chase Circle, Chantilly, VA 20151 USA
Tel: 703-378-5069 – Fax: 703-378-6913 –
e-mail: AbonguiABB@Yahoo.com
Employer Identification Number (EIN): 01-0610131

A Staff Profile of Kouassi Soman
Economist, Middle East & North Africa Regional Office
The World Bank, Washington, DC USA

    "There are people who learn about poverty in books, but then there are those who have lived it. That means you assess situations and measure progress differently."

Dedicated staff with a vision to reduce poverty:

    Kouassi Soman Economist Middle East and North Africa Region Talented. Passionate. Dedicated. Three words to describe World Bank Group staff—more than 10,000 people from around the world who have come to the organization to reduce poverty in lasting ways and encourage development for the benefit of all. Our jobs may be different but we all share the privilege of working at the world^s premier development institution. We continue a series of mini-portraits of Bank Group staff: who we are and the work we do every day.

Kouassi^s life experience and passion:  

  Though by all accounts a level-headed economist, Kouassi Soman erupts when elaborating on his Virginia car license plate, "FISH-LV." "I love fishing," he enthuses. "I can wake up at four o^clock and go. My daddy first taught me, and we fished with poles and nets, which was where I first developed my addiction!" With his father, Soman used to fish the waters of the Djoré, a tributary of the Comoé River in remote northeastern Côte d^Ivoire, where he was born. During the last few decades, however, this savanna area has succumbed to the encroaching desertification that is plaguing large parts of the African Sahel. "One of the saddest stories is that this river simply disappeared," he laments. "When I was young, the entire area used to be covered with forest, but now all the trees are almost gone."

  Education is key to life:

  After graduating from the University of Abidjan at the precocious age of twenty with a degree in statistics and engineering, Soman moved to Washington, D.C. He joined the Bank in 1984 as a "non-regular staff" and became a research assistant a year later. He worked for 15 years until being promoted to economist in 1998. He split his tenure evenly between posts in the Africa and MENA Regions, amassing valuable experience by working on dozens of structural adjustment projects, country assistant strategies, and other sector projects. Currently, Soman is the task manager for a technical assistance project for economic management in Djibouti. He also contributes to the Djibouti PRSP and a policy-based lending project for the country. Eighteen years in the Bank at a variety of levels has given Soman a hard-earned perspective on what it takes to make projects work. "Understanding the technical aspects and Bank processes is key, but being a humble negotiator is more important," he says. "The difficult process is listening to partners and persuading them about the best ways to approach various development challenges."

Surviving absolute poverty:  

  "There are people who learn about poverty in books, but then there are those who have lived it. That means you assess situations and measure progress differently," he says, emphasizing that many Bank Group colleagues benefit from a similar background. "For all of us, it is important to know how to really listen." Moving to help his country Soman saw an electric light bulb in action for the first time at age 11 when he left his village of Abongui-Morokro to attend secondary school in Bondoukou. That year, he slipped into his very first pair of shoes. Those memories are still so vivid -- just as sharp as the flowing water of the lost river -- that Soman recently fought to save Abongui-Morokro^s sole primary school. "When I was four years old, the school was shut down. It finally reopened in 1999, but was in danger of being closed again," he says. "I swore it would never be shut down twice in my lifetime."

The MENA Region saves a primary school in Côte d^Ivoire:   

 Soman explains that in Côte d^Ivoire there is fierce competition for publicly funded primary school facilities. As a result, villages that are not able to provide adequate housing for their government-funded teachers may forfeit their funding, thus losing teachers and schools to neighboring villages. By matching donations from his MENA colleagues dollar-for-dollar, Soman raised $5,500 in early 2001. With Abongui-Morokro villagers contributing labor and food, they built a three-bedroom villa for the teachers on school grounds, achieving the short-term goal of saving the school. Soman expresses deep appreciation for the generosity of his colleagues, and the project coordination of his eldest brother, Kobenan Sonan, who lives in Abidjan. But Soman^s respect and gratitude for his brother clearly extends much farther. "I owe every opportunity I ever had to my older brother," he admits. "Because he was so good at school, and because our own village school had been forced to close, his teachers arranged for me to follow him to his school, which was 50 miles away.

Nurturing his roots and community of orgin:  

 From then on, I literally followed his educational footsteps for the next 15 years until I left for the U.S." Soman is currently working to transform the early success of the project into a tax-deductible NGO called "Assah Bow Boka," which means "The Helping Hand," in his native Akan language. "My goal is to continue helping the community ensure basic education and school-based child nutrition," he says. "But we can^t really achieve sustainable progress unless we address other development challenges at the same time. So I am looking to expand activities, engaging community members in activities such as providing more safe water, maintaining access and feeder roads, working out the basic titling of farmlands, and other projects." Such progress would be a welcome improvement in a village where demand for better services has long gone unmet. School attendance is already surging from 90 students last year to 121 this year, with 165 estimated for next year.

PLease support Abongui^s Helping Hand:  

The fusion of Soman^s professional expertise and his personal, nonprofit enthusiasm is not unique among Bank Group staff, but it remains an inspiration. And in some small way, the development challenge in one African country looms a little less large. For more information on Soman^s Assah Bow Boka project, please click here. 

Posted: February 22, 2002.
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