Smita Singh

Smita Singh is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Open Society Foundation. Previously, Singh was the founding director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development Program. Under her leadership, the program carried out extensive international grant-making and started several new initiatives, including the Think Tank Initiative, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and the Partnership for Quality Education in Developing Countries.

At the foundation, Singh also helped create the International Initiative in Impact Evaluation, a new international agency devoted to improving the measurement of results in development interventions. She also initiated the foundation’s efforts to reform development assistance policy and practices, which included seeding the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Singh has lived and worked in several countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, her research interests focus on the comparative political economy of developing countries. She has also worked for the Commission on National and Community Service (now the Corporation for National Service), developing higher education initiatives and funding strategies for dispersing grants to community service and service-learning projects at over 200 colleges and universities. Before joining the commission, she worked at ABC News “Nightline” and, prior to that, with community-based women's organizations in India.

Singh was the interim NRGI governing board chair. Beyond NRGI, Singh sits on the governing boards of Oxfam America, Twaweza, the International Budget Partnership, and the Center for Global Development. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and serves on the U.S. President’s Global Development Council.