WASHINGTON (Halbeeg News) – US Senate has confirmed by voice vote that Larry Edward Andre, Jr a ranking career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Class of Minister-Counselor, to be the Ambassador of the US to the Federal Republic of Somalia.
He served as ambassador to Mauritania and Djibouti. He last held the position of Chargé d’Affaires ad interim at U.S. Embassy Juba, South Sudan.
André will replace Donald Yamamoto, who has served as the Ambassador to Somalia since November 2018.
He was among nine diplomats nominated for ambassadorship last April by President Biden, and the appointments was the first selection of overseas envoys since taking up office.
André joined the Foreign Service in 1990 with early postings in Nigeria and Cameroon. He later served as a management officer at the embassy in Conakry, Guinea, from 1998 to 2000.
He landed in the Horn of Africa as a regional environment officer for East Africa, working out of the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa from 2000 to 2002.
André returned to West Africa as the chief of mission at the embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from 2002-2004.
After nearly 15 years working in Africa, André returned to Washington DC but continued at the State Department. He served as the deputy director of the Office of West African Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs from 2004 to 2006.
He returned to East Africa in 2006, where André was a political counsellor at the U.S Embassy in Nairobi until 2008 where he moved to the embassy in Dar es Salaam. André was the Deputy Chief of Mission there until 2010.
André was the envoy and director of the Office of the Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan at the State Department when he stepped into his first role as an Ambassador in September 2014 when then-President Barack Obama nominated him as the ambassador to Mauritania.
He served in Nouakchott for three years but was moved to Djibouti by former President Donald Trump in 2017. He replaced Tom Kelly, who served in Djibouti City from June 2014 to January 2017.
André speaks fluent French.
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