The Ambassador: Carlos dos Santos (EMBA, ’99)

Many young people dream of a career in the foreign service, traveling the world and living in exotic locales. Not Carlos dos Santos. Growing up in Mozambique, he wanted to be an accountant.

It didn’t happen. While Dos Santos was still a teenager, his parents told him they could no longer afford tuition for his studies after high school. Instead, the young man found a job in his country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that enabled him to work and attend school at the same time. He ended up studying international relations and joining the diplomatic corps. After serving at posts in Zimbabwe, New York, Berlin, and London, he now lives in Washington, where he is Mozambique’s Ambassador to the United States and Canada.  

Flash back to 25 years ago: Dos Santos was stationed in New York as Mozambique’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations when he saw a New York Times advertisement for the Zicklin School’s Executive MBA program. He decided to apply, but not because he wanted to go back to crunching numbers.

“I wanted to improve my management skills,” he explains. “I needed to learn how to manage my organization—the mission I was running at the time.”

In addition to his management courses, Dos Santos says he “loved” his class on Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility, a relatively new concept at the time. Another favorite was Management Information Systems, which taught him that “even if you’re not an IS expert, you need to know what you can ask the experts to do for your organization.”

The Ambassador in his Washington, DC home

Dos Santos has stayed in touch with his alma mater over the years, participating in alumni reunions in New York and Washington, DC. He arranged a speaking engagement at Mozambique’s central bank for finance professor Joseph Onochie, a fellow immigrant from Africa who teaches Corporate Finance at Zicklin and has become a good friend. Dos Santos believed that Onochie’s teachings were so “essential” that the Central Bank of Mozambique would benefit from his presentations and discussions.

The Ambassador’s main task, however, is to promote investment in his country, and for that Dos Santos’ MBA degree has proved invaluable. “When I talk to businesspeople, I need to speak their language—to know what they mean by ‘ROI’ or ‘net present value,’ even if I don’t need to calculate it myself,” he notes. “I can also understand financial statements, which helps with the due diligence I perform with my colleagues at the embassy and in Mozambique.”

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