Susan Page is NDI's regional director for Southern and East Africa. A lawyer by training, Susan joined NDI in 2008 with 15 years of field experience working throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with the U.S. State Department, USAID and the United Nations.
From 2005-2007, Susan directed the Rule of Law program for the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). In addition to managing the UNMIS offices in Khartoum and Juba, Susan provided legal and constitutional advice to all parties involved in the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. She also furnished technical advice and analysis to the Darfur parties in Abuja and collaborated with the African Union-led mediation team, also in Abuja.
Before moving to Khartoum, Susan took up a State Department-funded technical advisor post in Nairobi with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Secretariat for Peace in Sudan. During this period, she was an integral member of the IGAD-led mediation process and was instrumental in providing legal and policy advice to the Secretariat and the Parties that led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement for the Sudan signed in Kenya on January 9, 2005.
Before focusing on Sudan, Susan headed the Justice and Human Rights Unit of the United Nations Development Program in Rwanda. Earlier in Kigali, Susan spent two years as the political officer at the U.S. embassy where she was the primary source of information and analysis on Rwandan judicial and human rights matters for the U.S. government; worked on the protection of refugees; drafted 1999 and 2000 U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports for Rwanda; analyzed Rwandan laws on the establishment of gacaca, a form of community based participatory justice modified to try genocide suspects; monitored the operations of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; and served as the primary political officer in Rwanda monitoring and reporting on issues related to the war in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 1993, she was seconded from the State Department to USAID where she spent five years working in USAID regional offices in Kenya and Botswana on a variety of issues, including strategies for post-genocide engagement in Rwanda. She also provided legal services to USAID missions to Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, and the 11 USAID missions in Southern Africa.
Susan began her career in 1991 as an attorney-adviser at the State Department, following a one-year postgraduate Rotary International fellowship researching children’s and women’s rights issues in Nepal. Her initial assignment for the Office of the Legal Adviser in the State Department revolved around political-military affairs in Washington.
Susan is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She and her husband Damien Coulibaly have a son, Marius, who attends the Lycee Rochambeau of Washington—his first time to live and attend school in the United States.
