Zienzile Dillon is the Municipal Finance and Local Infrastructure Advisor at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF). She is a senior finance and investment executive with more than 30 years of experience leading risk, governance, and investment strategy across global banking and advisory institutions.

Zienzile held leadership roles at major financial institutions: at Barclays Africa Group, she served as Head, Public Sector, Corporate and Investment Banking; at Absa Africa Group, as Managing Executive, Services Cluster Risk; at Ubank, as General Manager, Risk and Governance; at Standard Bank of South Africa, as Head of Treasury Risk Audits; and at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, as Deputy Director. She subsequently co-founded Carmel Global Capital, building a platform to deepen US–Africa trade and investment.

At UNCDF, her technical advisory work which intersects local government finance, infrastructure, and financial markets development, involves strategic partner engagements and origination, structuring, capital mobilization, deploying innovative financial solutions, resulting in making early-stage and last-mile markets investable.

She has received the Barclays One Africa Group CEO Gold Award for The Extraordinary for contributions to community and economic development, the Institute of Risk Management South Africa (IRMSA) Award, and served as Goodwill Ambassador to the United States for the African Union Economic Development Agency.

Zienzile is a dual Zimbabwe –South Africa national, fluent in English, with a proven track record at the intersection of global finance and development. A UK-qualified Chartered Certified Accountant, Zienzi holds an MBA in Finance, jointly awarded by the University of Wales and Manchester Business School UK, and a BSc (Hons) in Applied Accounting from Oxford Brookes University UK. She has also completed an Executive Leadership Development Program, Harvard Business School USA.