For the African Development Bank I make films that bring large development programmes down to human scale.

For the Bank’s 60th anniversary I wrote, directed and edited the film that opened its 2024 Annual Meetings in Nairobi. It was made for an extra-wide screen and shown to heads of state and several thousand delegates. I built it from the Bank’s video archive and stock footage, and made the titles and motion graphics.

Over three years I also directed, shot and edited a series of short documentaries for the Bank across six countries: Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tunisia. The films cover entrepreneurship, energy access, water and healthcare.

The first film follows entrepreneur Bola Bardet, who started Susu so other families could get what she couldn’t give her own father: health insurance for relatives back home. We follow Fiona in Paris, caring for her father in Abidjan. Susu is backed by the African Development Bank and the EU under Boost Africa.

In East Africa I made a short series on green energy: Ethiopian hydropower reaching the region and beyond, geothermal heat from Kenya’s Rift Valley, and Rusumo Falls stabilising Burundi’s grid.

Kipkemoi Kibias, who leads KETRACO, Kenya’s electricity transmission company, at the converter station where the high-voltage line from Ethiopia joins the Kenyan grid.

A surgeon at a Burundi hospital told me: decisions get made in an office, but you only understand what they mean when you stand where the change happens. In his neonatal unit, premature triplets were kept alive because of steady power from the Rusumo Falls hydro plant, co-funded by the AfDB.

Benban, one of the world’s largest solar parks, in the Egyptian desert. Hadeer works there as an engineer in 50-degree heat and sandstorms. They told her the sun would be too much for someone so small. She built her career on it.