Colin Coleman is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a South African banker based in Johannesburg. He is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Youth Employment Service nonprofit. Coleman is an independent nonexecutive member of the Board of the Foschini Group. He is also a member of the advisory board of AriseIIP, a developer and operator of industrial ecosystems in Africa, and serves on the board of Kyosk, an African consumer technology company.

Coleman is a former adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, where he taught a course on business in Africa. He was previously a distinguished fellow with Insead, and a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. In 2020, he served as a senior advisor to Eurasia Group.

Coleman was a chief executive officer, sub-Saharan Africa at Goldman Sachs until his retirement in 2019. In his time at Goldman Sachs, he also served as head of the investment banking division for sub-Saharan Africa, head of the Goldman Sachs South Africa office, managing director, and partner. Coleman has previously served on the steering committee of the CEO Initiative, and on the boards of both the National Business Initiative and Business Leadership South Africa.

In the 1980s, Coleman was an anti-apartheid activist, and from 1989, he was deeply involved in South Africa’s constitutional transition from apartheid to democracy. He served in working groups of the multiparty talks, facilitated the International Mediation Forum, and helped to negotiate the agreement to facilitate all parties’ participation in South Africa’s 1994 elections.

In 1996, Coleman was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders for Tomorrow. He also received Harvard Business School’s Business Statesman Award in 1994 and was named one of Euromoney’s World Top Ten Financing Leaders for the Twenty-First Century.