Henok Teferra Shawl served as an Ethiopian Ambassador in France before joining the private sector.
Henok will begin his new job of leading the giant US aircraft manufacturer’s African office in the new year. He is expected to be based in Addis Ababa. Prior to joining Boeing, Henok held a senior position in Safaricom Ethiopia, the country’s only foreign and private telecom operator.
Safaricom joined the lucrative Ethiopian telecom market recently rolling out its network in August 2022 competing the state owned Ethio Telecom a juggernaut boasting around 70 million subscribers. In his brief tenure, Henok served as Safaricom’s chief external and regulatory officer.
Henok grew in prominence and invited criticism particularly during Ethiopia’s bloody war that broke out late in 2020 in Tigray when he made several tv appearances on globally famed stations expressing the positions of Ethiopia’s federal government.
His career path also included his works in aviation and regulatory bodies.
At the national carrier Ethiopian Airlines, he worked as vice president of strategic planning. As a diplomat based in Paris, besides France he was also an ambassador to Spain, Portugal and the Holy See. Boeing has had good relations with Ethiopian Airlines spanning decades. A fatal crash in 2019 created frictions between the two companies. However, their relations seem to have smoother in recent years as was attested by the airline’s ordering of a historic number of planes in the recent Dubai air show.
