Anne Juuko kept the doors open.

When Uganda restricted movement in March 2020, some Stanbic customer-care staff needed transport and accommodation after being stranded at work. Expectant employees needed help reaching health services. Anne Juuko had been the bank's chief executive for less than a month. Customers still needed access to their money, and borrowers whose businesses had stopped trading needed time.

Juuko asked managers to check regularly on their teams. The bank arranged support for affected staff and started a mental-wellness program that encouraged employees to speak about difficulties they had tended to keep private. It kept about 80 percent of its branches open during the early restrictions, removed charges on its digital banking platforms and offered repayment relief to customers whose incomes had been disrupted.

Staff support, free digital transactions and repayment extensions all placed demands on the bank's resources. The bank paid for that care through staffing, credit decisions, and forgone income.

Before the corner office.

Juuko had spent almost two decades in banking before taking the chief executive role. She studied commerce at Makerere University and later earned a master's degree in strategic planning through Edinburgh Business School, part of Heriot-Watt University. She began her banking career in 2001 at Citi, where she rose to work in fixed income, currencies and commodities in Uganda. She later moved to Kenya to lead customer sales and derivatives marketing.

The work demanded attention to price, liquidity and counterparty risk. It also put her in front of businesses trying to manage exposures they could not wish away. She joined Standard Bank Group in 2012 as head of global markets at Stanbic Bank Uganda, carrying both the bank's pricing responsibilities and its clients' risks into the new role.

In Uganda, she led the bank's markets business through years in which it received repeated recognition as a primary dealer in government securities. In 2018, Standard Bank sent her to Namibia to lead corporate and investment banking. The move widened her responsibility from markets activity to lending, client relationships, and a larger share of the bank's balance sheet.

Juuko returned to Uganda in March 2020 to become Stanbic Bank Uganda's chief executive, the first woman to lead the institution.

The price of relief.

Stanbic restructured more than UGX 800 billion in loans in 2020. Juuko said a reduction in the bank's prime lending rate from 18 to 16 percent saved customers about UGX 26 billion in interest payments. The bank waived charges on digital transactions and increased its community investment to UGX 3.9 billion, including support for frontline health workers.

None of those measures made the credit risk disappear. Stanbic's provision for credit losses rose from about UGX 43.5 billion in 2019 to UGX 91.7 billion in 2020. Profit after tax fell from UGX 259 billion to UGX 242 billion. At the same time, customer deposits increased from UGX 4.7 trillion to UGX 5.5 trillion and net customer loans rose from UGX 2.9 trillion to UGX 3.6 trillion.

The bank was lending more while recognizing that more of its borrowers might struggle to repay. A repayment extension could keep a business alive, but the bank still had to measure the loss it might eventually absorb.

She also pushed beyond immediate relief. In June 2020, Juuko warned that women entrepreneurs faced greater barriers to finance and could be left behind by pandemic support designed without them in mind. Under her leadership, Stanbic later developed programs for women-led enterprises and set a target for employees with disabilities to make up a tenth of its workforce. Those were institutional choices about who could enter the bank, as a customer or as a colleague.

By the end of 2023, Stanbic Uganda Holdings reported profit after tax of UGX 412 billion, compared with UGX 242 billion in 2020. Its assets stood at UGX 9.3 trillion. Juuko had led its largest subsidiary through a period in which support for borrowers and the protection of the balance sheet had to be pursued together.

A wider map.

Her four-year term as Stanbic Bank Uganda chief executive ended in March 2024. Standard Bank Group appointed her as regional head of global markets for East Africa from April. She returned to foreign exchange, liquidity, and client hedging, now across seven markets.

She left Standard Bank Group in late 2025 after 13 years. When asked that December about reports of another senior role, she said she had not begun any new assignment and would speak when there was an official announcement.

On 28 September 2026, CEO East Africa reported, citing unnamed sources, that Juuko had been selected as the next director general of the East African Development Bank. She declined to comment to the publication. EADB had not announced an appointment, and its website still listed Benard Mono as acting director general.

If confirmed, Juuko would move from commercial banking to a development lender owned principally by Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. EADB can finance smaller businesses for longer than commercial banks typically do. It also faces pressure to turn its capital into more lending while maintaining credit discipline across sovereign and private-sector borrowers.

S&P Global Ratings said in February 2026 that EADB planned to roughly triple its loan book between 2024 and 2028. Much of the intended growth would be in lending to governments and state-owned enterprises. Tanzania accounted for almost two-thirds of the portfolio at the time of the assessment. More lending would widen the bank's reach, but it would also test the quality of its decisions and the concentration of its risks.

If Juuko's appointment is confirmed, she will arrive with experience in trading rooms, corporate lending, a national bank and regional markets. EADB will ask her to decide which projects deserve patient capital, how quickly the bank can grow and what losses it can bear. At Stanbic, she kept the doors open for staff and customers during a crisis. At EADB, she would have to keep them open for borrowers who need more time than a commercial lender can give, and for the borrowers who will come after them.