Marcela Escobari

In April 12, 2021, President Joseph Biden announced his intent to nominate Escobari to serve in her former role at USAID. On July 28, 2021, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing regarding her nomination. On December 18, 2021, her nomination was confirmed in the Senate.

In 2020, Escobari co-led the Development, Global Health and Refugee policy working group for President Joseph Biden’s presidential campaign.

In 2018, she became a visiting fellow and, later, a senior fellow, at the Brookings Institution, where she created the Workforce of the Future initiative. Her research at Brookings uses data and network analysis to chart cities’ paths toward economic growth; examine the dynamics of economic mobility in the U.S. labor market; and offer policy solutions to align economic and workforce development efforts at the city level, including responses to economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. She has also written on the role of the private sector in driving job quality in a sustainable manner. Escobari’s Brookings publications and research insights have been cited in publications such as the New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Washington Post, and Forbes Advisor.

In 2017, Escobari left USAID and became a Senior Advisor at Mastercard’s Center for InclusiveGrowth, where she advised on data philanthropy and research initiatives.

Escobari left CID in 2016 when she was confirmed as the first woman to serve as USAID’s Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean. In that role, she worked to reinforce U.S. support for the peace accord in Colombia, focused on the post-hurricane response in Haiti, and pushed for a more proactive strategy to confront the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela. In response to Congress’ doubling of funding to Central America, she launched a task force to ramp up talent and capacity at the regional hubs to disburse funds more strategically to combat the root causes of poverty and migration in the region.

She served as the Assistant Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean from May 2016 to January 2017 after being nominated by President Barack Obama on December 7, 2015 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 17, 2016. Previously, she was the Executive Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Before that, she led the Americas region and served on the Executive Committee of the OTF Group (formerly Monitor Group) and worked as a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan Chase & Company.

From 2011 to May 2016, Escobari also served on the board of Root Capital, a nonprofit focused on financing rural development globally.

From 2007 to 2016, Escobari served as the Executive Director of Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID), a research center working to generate breakthrough ideas that bring stable, shared, and sustainable prosperity to regions around the world. During her tenure, the Center tripled in size, with projects in 17 countries across 5 continents focused on unlocking constraints to economic growth. Under her leadership, the Center published the Atlas for Economic Complexity, a data visualization tool that allows people to explore global trade flows across markets, track these dynamics over time and discover new growth opportunities for every country.

Escobari was born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. She attended Santa Cruz Cooperative School (SCCS) high school. In 1992 she came to the United States to pursue a Bachelor’s degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in Economics from Swarthmore College in 1996. She graduated in 2001 from Harvard Kennedy School of Government with an M.A. in Public Policy. Her master’s thesis, “Assessing Network Applications for Economic Development ” won best Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE) in her graduating class.

Marcela X. Escobari (born November 16, 1973) is a Bolivian-American government official and diplomat currently serving as the Assistant Administrator of the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since January 13, 2022. She previously worked as a Senior Fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where she led the Workforce of the Future initiative.