Ethiopian Banker, Daniel Yohannes Leads Development Agency for Obama Administration
Tigrai Online
Jan. 21 2009
An Ethiopian immigrant is making history as the highest Ethiopian-American official in the Obama administration.
Daniel Yohannes was born in the Ethiopian capital. He completed his elementary school at Addis Ababa’s Nativity Boy’s School and later transferred to St. Joseph’s, a prestigious Catholic high school in Addis Ababa.
“In those days people of my generation were idealistic, full of energy, with a lot of love for each other, as well as love and respect for our parents, elders, and teachers,” Yohannes says.
“Growing up in Ethiopia, we had a wonderful awareness of our country as well as the world. We were more advanced in some ways than most teenagers today,” he says.
In 1970, the 17-year-old Yohannes came to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, California. After completing high school, he pursued his undergraduate studies at Claremont McKenna College and went to graduate School at Pepperdine University, where he obtained his MBA.
Of his time in California, Yohannes says the first few years were difficult. With no car he had to walk two to three hours a day trying to be on time for both classes and work.
With an undergraduate degree in economics and a graduate degree in finance, Yohannes was finally ready to plunge into the world of banking. He worked his way up to vice chairman of the sixth largest bank in the United States, U.S. Bank, which has assets close to $260 billion.
For many this would have been success enough. Not so for Daniel Yohannes. Taking an early retirement from the bank in 2003, he co-founded one of the first “green” banks in the United States, one that specialized in funding companies creating non-polluting technologies in northern California. Observers point out that Yohannes “went green” before the movement became fashionable.