Ambassador (Ret.) Eric P. Whitaker served on a recall appointment as Chargé d’affaires at Embassy Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, from January – June 2024. He previously served as a Re-employed Annuitant (REA) with the Bureau of African Affairs in 2022-2023, wherein he organized the Engaging African Regional Economic Communities Forum associated with the African Leaders Summit held in Washington, D.C. Ambassador Whitaker is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with 34 years of experience and holds the rank of Minister-Counselor.
He served as Chief of Mission at Embassy Niamey, Niger, from 2017- 2021, where he assisted in consolidating democracy in Niger through support for free and fair elections, training and equipping Nigerien defense and security forces to counter terrorism and trafficking, re-establishing the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as a mission after a 25-year absence, signing a Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact for $437m for increasing agricultural productivity, incorporating Niger into the President’s Malaria Initiative, enrolling Niger into a Partnership for Food Security, and opening a new embassy compound. Embassy Niamey hosts five U.S. Federal agencies and more than 650 employees overall.
Ambassador Whitaker served in the Bureau of African Affairs Front Office as acting Deputy Assistant Secretary during 2017 with responsibility for East Africa, Sudan, and South Sudan. His previous position was Director of East African Affairs in the same bureau from 2015 to 2017.
From 2013 to 2015, he served as Deputy Chief of Mission at Embassy N’Djamena, Chad. Before that, he served as Foreign Policy Advisor (POLAD) to the U.S. military from 2012-2013 at the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and as Counselor for Economic Affairs from 2010-2012 at Embassy Nairobi, Kenya. From 2008-2010, he served as Deputy Chief of Mission and then as Chargé d’affaires at Embassy Niamey, Niger.
Ambassador Whitaker also served as an Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (E-PRT) Leader in Baghdad, Iraq, heading an eight-member team composed of U.S. Department of State, USAID, and United States Department of War civilians. Ambassador Whitaker’s previous tours were in Khartoum, Sudan; Maputo, Mozambique; Bamako, Mali; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Seoul, South Korea. He also served as Chargé d’affaires on temporary coverage at both Embassy Asmara, Eritrea (2014) and Embassy Bangui, Central African Republic (2015). Furthermore, he served in the U.S. Department of State – Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs as a Trade Policy Officer for Africa and the Middle East, and as a Weinberg Fellow at the former Wilson School at Princeton University.
He has a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and a Master of Science degree in community health education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Pittsburgh, minoring in international affairs; and a Master of Public Policy degree from the former Wilson School at Princeton University. Before the Foreign Service, he served as a Community Health Development Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines and as Assistant to the City Manager for the City of Lodi, California.
Ambassador Whitaker speaks Portuguese, Spanish, French, Visayan, and Korean. He has received more than 20 service awards from the Department of State as well as the U.S. Department of Defense Meritorious Civilian Honor Award. The Government of Niger named him a Commander in the Order of Merit of Niger upon the conclusion of his service. A frequent commencement speaker, he also served the American Foreign Service Association in the June 2025 Road Scholar program, “Foreign Policy with the American Foreign Service” at the Chautauqua Institution.
Having retired in 2021, he established the Eric P. Whitaker Scholarship Fund with the Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley in Illinois, where he also served on the Vision for the Future focus group and the Scholarship Committee. He also founded the Whitaker Scholarship at the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois, where he is a 2022 Distinguished Alumnus and a member of the President’s Council. Finally, he founded the Whitaker Scholarship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public and International Affairs, where he is on the school’s Board of Visitors and a member of the Chancellor’s Circle.