Dr. Cheikh Mbacke

DR. CHEIKH MBACKÉ is Senior Advisor to the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Population Program. In this capacity, he works in consultation with the Foundation’s officers to help improve the training of African population scientists and to increase the availability of population, reproductive health, and related data to scholars in Africa since July 2006.

Before taking this assignment, Dr. Mbacké worked for the Rockefeller Foundation for fourteen years occupying successively the positions of Program Officer for Population Sciences (1992-1999), representative for Eastern Africa (1999-2000), director of the Africa Regional Program based in Nairobi, Kenya (2000-2003), Vice President for Administration and Regional Programs based in the Foundation’s headquarters in New York City (2003-2005), and Senior Advisor working from Dakar, Senegal until June 2006.

Dr. Mbacké, a statistician and population scientist by training, began his career as a civil servant at the Senegalese Statistical Bureau in January 1976 before spending six years as a researcher and head of the training division of the Center for Applied Studies and Research on Population and Development (CERPOD) at the Sahel Institute in Bamako, Mali from 1986 to 1992.

Dr. Mbacké has a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE) in Paris, France, 1975; a master’s degree in demography from the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographique (IFORD) in Yaoundé, Cameroon, 1979; and a PhD in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., 1986.