The former head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has led the Rockefeller Foundation since 2017.
Dr. Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, has been appointed as a Class C director for a three-year term to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Since 2017, the Indian American has served as the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropy whose goal is to advance human welfare globally. On their website, the foundation states that they “apply data, science, and innovation to improve health for women and children, create nutritious and sustainable food systems, end energy poverty for over a billion people worldwide, and enable meaningful economic mobility in the United States and around the world.”
Shah founded and served as managing partner of Latitude Capital, a private equity firm that specialised in energy and infrastructure projects in Asia and Africa, prior to joining the foundation. He was the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) prior to that. He led the U.S. responses to the 2010 Haitian earthquake and the 2014 West African Ebola pandemic while holding that position. He also securing bipartisan support helped the Global Food Security Act and the Electrify Africa Act pass.
Shah “shares a dynamic new model for realising transformative change, inspired by his own work and that of The Foundation on some of the biggest humanitarian efforts of the 21st century,” in his October publication “Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happen.”
He was the founder of Latitude Capital, a private equity firm that specialised in infrastructure and power projects in Asia and Africa. He was also a Georgetown University Distinguished Fellow in Residence. His creation of the International Financing Facility for Immunisation, which helped transform the global vaccine industry and save millions of lives, was made possible during his tenure at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
He founded the National Institute for Food and Agriculture while holding the positions of chief scientist and undersecretary for research, education, and economics at the US Department of Agriculture prior to joining USAID. He established the International Financing Facility for Immunisation during his tenure as a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
