Africa a Lifelong Focus for New U.S. Banking Envoy : Finance: African Development Bank post continues Alice M. Dear’s 24-year involvement with the continent’s commerce.

Alice M. Dear remembers looking curiously at a photograph covering a wall at the Senegalese mission to the United Nations. Someone explained to her that the young child with the large belly was underfed.

“Here I was, a sociology major, traveling around the world, and I didn’t recognize a symptom of malnutrition,” she said. “At that moment, it made me more aware of the disparity in the world of developing countries.”

That moment 24 years ago helped define Dear’s career. It carried her through professions that ranged from flight attendant to entrepreneurial importer to global banker.

But always there was the underlying theme of underdeveloped Africa. Now she’s in a direct position to do something about it.

Earlier this month, the Senate unanimously confirmed Dear as the new U.S. representative to the African Development Bank, a 75-nation group that lends money and provides technical assistance to Africa’s underdeveloped economies.

Dear, 46, brings to the job fluency in French, still widely spoken in the former French colonies of Africa. She also brings a widespread respect from her acquaintances in the banking world.

“She is well-suited for that job, more so than other people coming to it,” said Herbert Whiteman Jr., a vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

“Generally, they have to learn some form of international banking. She’s already been in that arena and knows several of the players,” he said. “She’s young enough to be enthusiastic and old enough to have the proper experience.”

Dear’s enthusiasm can be traced to her childhood. She was voted most likely to succeed by her high school classmates in Gary, Ind.

She dabbled successfully as an entrepreneur in importing African crafts. She was a banker at Irving Trust (now part of the Bank of New York) for 11 years, concentrating on the Middle East and Africa.

Dear said she hopes to put her imprint on the African Development Bank’s agenda. She spoke in an interview before her departure to the bank’s headquarters in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.

“I think I am bringing together important skills, sensitivity and exposure that will allow me to make a unique presentation,” Dear said.

For starters, Dear said she would scrutinize the bank’s portfolio of loans to assess their quality, or the ability of the borrowers to repay. She also said she wants American businesses to understand the investment opportunities in Africa.

She said another priority is to “focus on gender issues, making certain that women have access to funds and technology for economic development so they can play their role in economic development.”

Dear has embraced African culture as part of her life. She favors African dress at diplomatic and business events. She rooted herself in a house in Harlem, crammed with African art from her many trips.

Looking around her living room, at its masks, paintings and sculpture, Dear said it makes her feel as though she were in Africa, where “I feel relaxed, I feel very much at home.”

Before she was confirmed, government officials had to talk to people in each of the 40 countries she’s visited in recent years. Friends describe her as “Miss African Development.”

Dear’s regular travels to Africa began after she graduated from Howard University with a degree in sociology and joined Pan American World Airways as a flight attendant. Pan Am later made her expertise available to Air Zaire as a technical assistant, where she took an interest in banking and running a business.

First, she realized that understanding finance was important to development. Also, “the way in which the airline was being run made me say to myself: ‘This is no way to run an airline.’ ”

She enrolled in Pace University’s graduate business school in New York and got a dose of what it was like to run a business herself. Dear teamed up with a former housemate, Gloria Harper Dickinson, who now is chair of the African American Studies Department at Trenton State College in New Jersey.

“In the mid-70s, we had a brainstorm that was 15 years too early, to start an African import business,” Dickinson said. During their travels to the continent, they had been “impressed with the variety of products in Africa. We were disturbed by the quality of products imported to the States. They were not the same,” she said. “Why were they importing this junk?”

But after two years of conventions and weekend shows, all while both were studying, “It got to the point where we said: ‘This is crazy. We can’t be packing and unpacking these packages on the weekends.’ We just stopped.”

After graduating from Pace, she spent 11 years at Irving Trust, rising to vice president. She could see how money was used for private development.

“Throughout my career, there was a conflict because there I was, in a commercial bank with a development banker’s heart,” Dear said.

“I was very much bound by country limits, by the profile of the loan portfolio the bank wanted to maintain. While I was pressured, I recognized my presence made a difference. I was able to make the bank pay attention to Africa.”

Her diplomatic life developed simultaneously with her professional life. She became the Non-Governmental Organization representative to the United Nations for the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and led her sorority chapter in donating money and time to helping villages and women in Africa through Africare, a Washington-based group devoted to rural development in Africa.

“Her chapter was way ahead of everyone else. It’s a chapter of dynamic women,” said Melvin P. Foote, coordinator of the Constituency for Africa, an organization affiliated with Africare.

But even among those women, Dear stood out. Foote recalled thinking, “Wow, who is this woman? She’s connected to all kinds of people.”

Dorothy Davis Joseph, public affairs officer for the African-American Institute in New York, said Dear’s passion for Africa was well known within the New York African American community.

“She walks her talk. She’s promoting Africa all the time in conscious and realistic terms. She’s very pro-Africa, she’s very pro-America too,” Joseph said.

Even though Dear says her career prepared her for the African Development Bank position, she did not initially seek it.

Albert White, a friend and former banking colleague now a vice president at Network Solutions Inc., a Herndon, Va.-based consulting firm, was the catalyst behind Dear’s appointment, she said.

White said he was called by President-elect Clinton’s staff seeking African American appointees and had to convince Dear she could get the job.

“She took it and ran with it. She put together her own campaign to get her into the position,” White said.

On a mantle in her Harlem home sits a photograph of the Clintons and Dear, the President’s arm around his nominee.

“She really cares about Africa; she knows the issues and knows how America works,” Joseph said. “She’s not just a political appointment.”