David Marc de Ferranti, an American-born economist specializing in international development (i.e., which focuses on how low- and middle-income countries can develop out of poverty), has spent over 40 years working on and in more than 50 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Leading initiatives aimed at helping struggling populations to build better futures (5 billion people worldwide live on less than $20 a day), he headed up the World Bank’s programs to accelerate progress in health, education, nutrition, and other areas of social services in low- and middle-income countries (about $3 billion annually). He later oversaw the World Bank’s financial support to Latin America and the Caribbean, with responsibility for a $25 billion loan portfolio. Subsequently, he founded Results for Development (R4D), was its first CEO, and is now its Board Chair.
In other roles, he was Associate Administrator of the US federal government’s agency for food and nutrition assistance to low-income families in the US, where he managed its 2,300-person staff and its $3 billion budget for Food Stamps, School Feeding Programs, and the Women, Infants, and children Program. He led programs at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) , the Brookings Institution , Rand (the think tank) , the United Nations Foundation , and has held appointments at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy . He has served on the Boards of the Rockefeller Foundation , Nutrition International (as Board Chair), the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (Chair), the Inter-American Dialogue (Treasurer), Transparency International , Synergos , the Campbell Collaboration International Development Group , Technoserve , an advisory board for the global conglomerate Veolia , and the Health Financing Task Force.
