Babak Yektafar

Program Director, Middle East and North Africa

Babak Yektafar is a Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa at CIPE where he works on private sector and ecosystem reform. Yektafar has been working on issues including corporate governance, anti-corruption compliance, open data, entrepreneurship, and business agenda development since 2009.

Prior to that, he worked at the Washington based think-tank, World Security Institute, where he founded and was the editor-in-chief of Washington Prism, a weekly online journal of culture, politics, economics, and public affairs. From 1999 to 2005, Yektafar was a senior producer with C-SPAN network’s national live morning program, Washington Journal. He has appeared on CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, PBS, and numerous other media outlets and has produced articles for publications such as World Policy Review and Foreign Policy.