Nicole Kearse

Nicole Kearse is Senior Legal Counsel at the African Legal Support Facility (ALSF). She has been with the ALSF since May 2018.

Nicole has practiced law for over a decade in the fields of finance and general corporate law. Her focus in the last 8 years has been on Africa. Prior to joining the ALSF, Nicole co-founded and managed Krescent Consulting, a firm providing strategic advisory services and organizational and IT consulting to African law firms, small and medium-sized businesses, non-profit organizations and start-ups. Nicole also acted as the Director of Learning and Strategic Development for ILFA (International Lawyers for Africa), a UK-based non-profit focused on building excellence in African legal services.

Before founding Krescent, Nicole was the deputy managing director of DaMina Advisors, an Africa-focused frontier consulting firm, where she concentrated on regulatory and legal issues related to doing business in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nicole has worked with top global law firms including Shearman & Sterling and Baker & McKenzie. In this capacity, she advised Fortune 500 companies regarding dozens of multimillion-dollar, cross border transactions. Nicole also worked at Citibank in it's Latin America and Caribbean Division, where she advised on bilateral lending transactions to commercial borrowers and large syndicated commercial lending transactions.

Nicole earned her Juris Doctor from the Georgetown University Law Center and master`s degrees from Columbia University where she focused on francophone African culture and from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she focused on business development in Sub-Saharan Africa.