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Some careers are defined not by titles but by the quiet turning points they set in motion. Bakari Traoré belongs to that rare category. A business lawyer and tax specialist, attorney, and consultant in governance, CSR and ethics, this discreet Ivorian has spent three decades helping to lay, stone by stone, the foundations of West Africa’s business framework.
The decisive shift came in the late 1990s, when this doctor of business law and economic law drew his minister’s attention to the glaring obsolescence of the texts governing commercial companies — laws dating back to 1867 and 1925, inherited from the colonial era. From that observation was born a national project that soon became regional: the reform of OHADA.