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Ms. Sophia Bekele is a business and corporate executive, who, through education, entrepreneurial experience and international exposure, has performed superlatively in roles that straddle both the public and private sectors. Ms. Bekele’s has worked for multinational consulting firms and large financial/banking companies in Corporate America such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Bank of America, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi/Union Bank of California, San Francisco, to mention but a few. From these initial corporate environments, Her experience included business management in diverse areas such as technology risk assessment of financial markets and instruments, financial engineering risk management, computer quality assurance, information systems security/auditing and control, technology evaluation and project management in private international and transnational corporations.
Ms Bekele then broke-off from her corporate career to pursue her passion in International Technology development and founded CBS International (www.cbsintl.com), a California based company, and serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. She currently consults for Private, Governments and international organizations in the fields of development, governance and long-term strategic planning. Additionally, Ms. Bekele has been advising in corporate development/communications programs for various start-ups and OTC within the US as well as Corporate governance. She has successfully built international and national clients.
These and the above positions in Ms. Bekele’s career plays have a pivotal role in building, guiding, and directing the overall future of the private/public sector in a collaborative fashion with members of Executive and Senior management and high level Public Authorities to identify, define and evaluate key strategic issues and develop appropriate policy and remediation guidelines to mitigate exposures. Ms. Bekele and her companies is currently assisting Ministry of Telecom & Infrastructure on internet governance project in Africa as well as initiated and leading two key continental internet projects in Africa – Continental integrated information system (www.ciin4africa.blogspot.com) and Dotafrica continental domain name (www.dotconnectafrica.org) to assist African countries in Connectivity and Regional integration.
Ms. Bekele serves on high-level public policy advisory boards. She currently serves as a Board member of Golden Gate University, San Francisco and Internet Society of San Francisco (SFBay-ISOC); was an appointed policy advisor to ICANN (Internet Corporation Assigned Names & Numbers), advisory member to various United Nation initiatives, former Board Member of Information Systems and Control Association (ISACA-SF), and advisory member to the World Affairs Council, Contra Costa. Sophia is also invited to speak on international foras on the work she is involved in and general current global economic affairs.
Ms. Bekele holds an MBA in Management of Information Systems (MIS) from Golden Gate University, San Francisco and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computing and Business Information Systems, at San Francisco State University. She has informal studies in International Relations. She is also a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Control Specialist (CCS), Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT), as well as a Rotary Paul Harris Fellow (PHF) and active being ambassador to various Rotary clubs.
