Marcela Escobari is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she is leading an initiative on the Future of the Workforce. Previously, she was a Senior Advisor to the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. She was the Assistant Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean. Nominated by President Obama, and approved by the US Senate, she led a Bureau with an annual budget of approx $1 billion focused on poverty, inequality, citizen security, and governance. From 2007-2016, Ms. Escobari served as Executive Director at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, a research center working to generate breakthrough ideas that bring stable, shared, and sustainable prosperity to developing countries. Prior to the Center for International Development, Escobari was head of the Americas region at the OTF Group, where she advised governments on how to increase export competitiveness and harness the private sector to eradicate poverty. She began her career as a mergers & acquisitions banker at JP Morgan in New York. Ms. Escobari holds a BA in Economics from Swarthmore College and an MA in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is co-author of the book “In the River They Swim: Essays from around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty