- Organisation
- Independent
- Role
- Market systems specialist
I'm an MSD specialist with 15 years of international development experience. My MSD expertise spans programme design and implementation, especially in fragile and conflict-affected places and in other less conventional contexts for applying MSD. I am first and foremost a practitioner, but I also have academic or other theoretical background in institutional economics (including history and political economy), innovation theory, descriptive linguistics, ecological economics, and complexity theory. I've brought abstract concepts from these disciplines down to earth with formalised but tractable approaches to managing complexity, pragmatic tactics for co-creating catalytic (grant and non-grant) partnerships with the private sector, and ways to embed long-term systemic resilience goals into the day-to-day work of MSD programme teams.
My deepest MSD experience is in partnership facility design and grant management, but I have also completed non-technical assignments as a finance and operations director, security manager, project management consultant, and executive coach. I develop and teach new frameworks and curricula as well; in my adjunct faculty role at Columbia, I co-instruct a spring semester graduate course on sustainable enterprise development. I've completed short-term consulting assignments worldwide supporting market systems analyses, partnership programme launches, MSD training for donors and project teams, and private-sector grant design, but my long-term roles in team leadership were in Haiti, Mozambique, and the eastern DRC. Currently, I am functionally bilingual in English and French, but I have also used Portuguese, Russian, and Haitian Creole in professional settings. I am based in northern Vermont in the U.S. and available for remote or in-country consulting work.
Contributions
Blogs
- Market actors are people, too: is MSD reflexively conflict-averse? [2026]
- A systems-change approach that built itself? Learning from the ground up in eastern DRC [2026]
- Can MSD’s systemic ambitions survive ever-growing market systems? [2025]
- Navigating systemic resilience trade-offs in conflict settings: examples from Ituri, DRC [2022]
- Working with the private sector for systemic change: why build a partnership facility in the first place? [2020]