Contributors
EurAfrican 2024

Rui Barros
Founder and CEO, Gen Alpha & Advisory Board Member, ThirdWay Partners, Portugal
Rui Barros is currently an Impact Investor and an Entrepreneur in Sustainable Finance, after a 20 years career as an executive in the corporate world having worked for large financial services firms in Europe, the US, and Africa. In 2023 he founded his company Gen Alpha (www.gen-alpha.net) which is working on projects for the Green Transition of Africa and Impact Investing. For the last few years, he has been part of the Advisory Board of ThirdWay Partners (www.thirdway.earth), an investment and advisory firm focused on sustainable development and he is also a Founding Partner and Board Member at Reaction – Venture Capital (www.reaction.global), a global partnership community and venture fund manager with a bias on climate change and strong links to Stanford University and its ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship. In 2023, Rui Barros has graduated at Oxford University as an IMAGINE Leader (www.imagine.one), the social community of global transformational leaders and disruptive innovators who believe in systemic change and are committed to climate action and social equity. In parallel, for the last 5 years, Rui has been an active member of YPO – Young Presidents Organization (www.ypo.org), the world’s largest leadership community of chief executives with over 35,000 global members, where he currently holds several global leadership positions being part of the ExCo for the Sustainable Business Network and the Financial Services Network, as well as leading the group Y3i – YPO’s Impact Investing Initiative.
Until 2022, Rui was for 8 years the CEO of Absa Mozambique, a bank he led to become $1bn+ size, after a long career in international finance in firms like Euronext/BVLP, Fitch Ratings, Lehman Brothers, Atlantico Europa, Standard Bank and Barclays. Rui graduated in Economics at UTAD and holds an MSc in Finance by the Portuguese Catholic University. He studied and engaged in academic research in the USA, at Arizona State University, and more recently completed the Advanced Management Programme (AMP, 2013) at INSEAD in Singapore and the Stanford Executive Program (SEP, 2018) in California. He has been a guest speaker and a lecturer at Cambridge University, Imperial College, INSEAD, Portuguese Catholic University and for The Financial Times.