Magdi M. Amin is a Sudanese American economist, technology investor, professor and development expert whose family's story spans three generations of displacement from Sudan's cycles of military coups and authoritarian rule.
Magdi served as Senior Advisor to the Minister of Finance in Sudan's Transitional Government (2019-2021), helping implement economic reforms that stabilized the currency and launched the country's largest cash transfer program. He fled Sudan following the October 2021 military coup, mirroring his father's forced exile fifty years earlier.
Over two decades, Magdi worked with the World Bank and IFC across Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, specializing in post-conflict economic recovery and private sector development. As Managing Director at Omidyar Network's Responsible Technology practice (2018-2020), he led initiatives to ensure technology serves rather than exploits vulnerable populations. He currently serves as Managing Partner of African Renaissance Ventures and teaches at Johns Hopkins SAIS and Carnegie Mellon University Africa.
Born in Los Angeles to a Sudanese diplomat and pediatrician, Magdi grew up with his Nubian grandmother, whose stories of ancient water wheels and drowned villages first sparked his interest in how displacement can strengthen rather than weaken cultural identity. His 2013 pilgrimage to flooded Nubia with his teenage son inspired this memoir.
Magdi holds degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins. When not writing about Sudan's revolutionary cycles, he can be found cycling or researching the black pharaohs who once ruled both Egypt and Nubia. He lives with his family in Northern Virginia
