Steven Gray's OBE: financing British trade across West Africa

For most people an export credit guarantee is an abstraction. For the British firms Steven Gray works with across West Africa, it is often the difference between winning a contract and walking away.

Gray was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to British businesses in West Africa - recognition of a career spent making deals happen in demanding places.

The financing that makes deals possible

Since 2018 he has been Head of West and Central Africa for UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government's export credit agency. Working from Ghana, his job is to open doors for British exporters: arranging the financing terms that let overseas buyers say yes, backing the working-capital loans and performance guarantees that let UK firms take on ambitious projects, and insuring them against a buyer defaulting. Where a British company might once have lost out to a rival with cheaper credit behind it, that support helps level the field.

Turning intentions into things that get built

The work draws on more than thirty years in complex markets across Africa and the Middle East, in oil and gas, mining, logistics, trading and construction. Gray has built a reputation for one skill in particular: taking a government's stated intention and turning it into a programme that is genuinely bankable and ready to deliver, then holding together the ministers, lenders, development-finance institutions and private operators whose agreement is needed before anything can begin. Much of it has happened where that is hardest to do.

Recognition

The OBE marked the effect of that effort - British jobs supported, British expertise exported, and durable commercial relationships built across the region.

Gray holds an MBA from Heriot-Watt University and completed an executive programme on oil, gas and mining governance at the University of Oxford. He speaks English and conversational French.