Allen is a renowned lawyer and development practitioner with proven success shaping long-term vision and offering strategic leadership to nurture growth across commercial and non-profit sectors working across Africa. She has excelled in spearheading scalable projects/portfolios across the continent, tailoring future-focused approaches, and driving decision-making to deliver robust results reducing the time and cost to transport goods along key transport corridors, increase exports and Jobs.

In her current role as the Deputy CEO and Chief of Programmes at TradeMark Africa, she provides strategic direction, operations and technical delivery of TMA’s entire project portfolio in infrastructure, trade environment, and business competitiveness spanning 20 countries in Africa. Allen is also passionate about Climate Change and Gender and chairs the Environment, Social and Governance Steering Committee. Prior to this, Allen was a consultant for the African Export Import Bank supporting the implementation of the Intra Africa Trade Initiative across the continent, and has served with various agencies including Standard Chartered Bank, and as past CEO of AVID Development, a consulting firm working on key issues of trade, development, and governance in Africa Allen is also a co-founder of Girls For Girls, a global mentoring initiative that seeks to empower ONE million girls and women to lead. Girls For Girls now has a footprint in 40 countries globally, 11 in Africa with over 10,000 mentees and 1,500 mentors.

Allen holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (Edward Mason Fellow, 2017) and a Masters in International Business Law from the University of Manchester, UK (1998).