Diana Amabelle Nwakanma is an international development expert, social change agent, and coach. She brings over 14 years of experience in social development, human and health services, designing, managing and implementing youth and women/girl-centered programming with an emphasis on innovation, entrepreneurship, strategy, and empowerment. She has worked across NGOs, government as well as private agencies, spanning four continents and throughout her career, has overseen a range of programmes and initiatives – from development to execution – that have positively impacted the economic, social, psychosocial and health development of vulnerable groups.

Amabelle is currently the Director of Programmes at LEAP Africa, overseeing all high-level programmatic strategy and execution and a portfolio of programmes and units that address key youth development areas including social innovation, financing/impact investment, entrepreneurship, employability and technology. In this role she oversees the Social Innovators Programme, which is a fellowship programme that, over the past 10 years, has supported social enterprises across 12 African countries, with capacity building, tools and resources to enable them to be investment ready.

She has also worked as an independent consultant nationally and internationally and has overseen and facilitated engagements with government, private, non-profit and civil society organisations to finance and execute projects and initiatives that improved their effectiveness.
Passionate about promoting equality, access to funding/resources and overall social impact, she is keen about exploring the nexus between social, financial and environmental responsibility in Africa; and seeing socially responsible investing become the foremost form of bottom-line thinking.