Mr. Manuel Benard is a Senior Investment Officer – Transport in the Public Sector Clients Department of Region 2 covering Central and West Asia, Europe, Latin America, North Africa and Middle East of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). He supervises and manages AIIB support to a number of large-scale infrastructure projects predominantly in Asia. Previously, Deputy Team Leader for a Consortium of international consultant, Manuel supervised a portfolio of EIB Technical Assistance projects in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), continuing his roles as a Senior Economist for EIB before where he provided economic and financial analysis for a portfolio of 17 transport projects in 6 MENA countries, with a potential project loan value over €3.5bn. He also served 7 years as Principal Transport Economist at AfDB, working closely with national administrations to analyze Bank financing requests for major road and rail investments (>$8bn). His career prior to this saw him lead the Economic and Financial Analysis of infrastructure projects in the private sector and for the United Nations. Moreover, Manuel has written several articles on transport in academic papers and has participated to several international fora, workshops and panels on transport and logistic topics.