Staff

Sukhwinder Singh

Director of the Africa Training Institute and AFRITAC South

Prior to Joining AFRITAC South and Africa Training Institute, Mr. Sukhwinder Singh was an Advisor in the African Department of the IMF. He has worked at the Fund for 24 years.He was the first Director of the IMF’s South Asia Regional Training and Technical Assistance Center

(SARTTAC) which he helped set up in New Delhi from 2016-2020. During his Fund career he has worked in the Strategy, Policy and Review, Asia and Pacific, and African Departments. During this time, he served as IMF resident representative in Nepal and in Ethiopia, and mission chief to Chad, Cape Verde, and Sierra Leone. He was also Director of IMF East AFRITAC in Tanzania from 2013-2016. He has served as Assistant to Antoinette Sayeh, former Deputy Managing Director of the IMF. Prior to joining the IMF, Mr. Singh worked at the Bank of England, was an Overseas Development Institute fellow at the Bank of Guyana, and worked at the Canadian International Development Agency. He is a national of the UK.

Andrea Salerno

Deputy Director of the Africa Training Institute

Mr. Salerno was appointed Deputy Director of ATI in July 2024. A national of Italy, he has joined the IMF about a decade ago, serving in different roles. More recently, Mr. Salerno was a Senior Economist in the Office of Budget and Planning, where he led engagements with the Board and co-authored key Fund budget papers.

He also served as a Senior Technical Assistance Officer, working across the Fund’s trust fund architecture, and as a Special Assistant to the Director of the Institute for Capacity Development. Mr. Salerno joined the IMF from the IFC’s regional office in Egypt, where he covered the Middle East and North Africa region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. He holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Nicolas Aragon

Lecturer at the Africa Training Institute

Prior to joining the Africa Training Institute, Mr Nicolas Aragon worked at the

National Bank of Ukraine as Principal Economist. During this time he worked in the Research division, and supported diverse policy responses during COVID and the war. His research is policy oriented, and deals with the intersection between economic crises, growth, and policy responses; both in developed and developing countries. He also lectured at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid and at Kyiv School of Economics, and held a risk modeling expert position at UBS. Nicolas is an Argentinian citizen and holds a Ph.D in Economics from European University Institute.

Ilhame Lagrine

Lecturer at the Africa Training Institute

Ilhame Lagrine joined the ATI as Resident Advisor in September 2025.

She began her career in 2014 at the Central Bank of Morocco, where she was responsible for inflation and external accounts forecasting and analysis, as well as supporting monetary policy decisions. She later worked as a consultant for the OECD, focusing on the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis in Asia, before joining the French Treasury in 2021. There, she served as Deputy Head of the Short-Term Economic Analysis Unit, specializing in macroeconomic projections and forecasting models, and subsequently as Deputy Head of the Research and Strategy Unit at Agence France Trésor, where she contributed to the design and evaluation of France’s debt management strategy. She has also lectured at various universities and high engineering schools in France. Ilhame is a French Moroccan citizen and holds a PhD in International Economics from Rennes University (France), two master’s degrees in Econometrics and Development Economics from Aix-Marseille University (France), and an Engineering degree in Applied Economics from the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (INSEA) in Rabat (Morocco).