Astou Dia

Astou is the founder of A to A Partners, a business and relationship coaching firm that helps individuals and groups transform their teams and their businesses. She is also one of the co-founders of Impact Hub Abidjan an incubator and accelerator based in Abidjan. Before starting her own ventures, Astou was Associate Partner and Office Director at Dalberg, a strategy consulting firm focusing on international development. Astou’s global coaching and facilitation skills stem from thirteen years of experience in strategy and management consulting in Europe and Africa. She has worked with private corporations, governments, communities, and donors in areas such as governance and operational effectiveness, agriculture and food security, health, youth employment, access to finance, and women’s economic empowerment. Astou has led various engagements, in West, Central, and East Africa. She led missions spanning sectorial studies (institutional framework, value chain analysis, etc.), program design (industrialization, financial services for SHF, women participation, etc.), identification of investment opportunities (investment cycles analysis, identification of bankable operations, etc.), and impact evaluation (midline and endline program evaluations). She worked with multiple development organizations as well as private sector players across Africa to foster private investment. Astou worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on its Investment Support Program (ISP) to provide a deep understanding of the institutional framework as well as the challenges facing private investment in the agricultural sector in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Tanzania. She supported the Millennium Challenge Corporation in conducting comprehensive diagnostics of the agriculture and food security systems and in designing interventions to lift constraints to private sector investment in The Gambia, Togo, and Ethiopia. Astou is fluent in French and English and has a strong working knowledge of Spanish and Italian. She holds a Masters in International Economics from École Normale Supérieure (ENS) Cachan in association with Université Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris.