Isabel Guerrero is an economist that has worked in development all her professional life, driven to change the world in which she lives. Throughout her career, she’s helped those with the least break out of the cycle of poverty, while celebrating the intrinsic beauty and dignity in each person.

She started as a macro economist, designing policy reforms from the World Bank adjustment operations in Philippines, Morocco and the Former Soviet Union. Isabel was a manager in the Economic Development Institute, training government officials, parliamentarians and journalists on macroeconomics, decentralization and trade.

Between 1997 and 2008, Isabel was sequentially a Country Director for Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and India. In that capacity she designed the World Bank Country Strategies for each of these countries, covering a wide range of sectors, including infrastructure, social development, environment, private sector development, rural development and livelihood programs, the financial sector, macroeconomics and trade policy.

Between 2008 and 2013 she was the Vice-President for the South Asia region at the World Bank, where she managed a US$39 billion dollar portfolio, a US$150 million administrative budget and US$6.2 billion in Trust Funds.

Isabel co-founded IMAGO Global Grassroots in April 2014, a non-profit that works with organizations at the Base of the Pyramid to help them scale up.

She is a Council Member of the United Nations University and a Board member of the Presencing Institute at MIT.

Since 2014 Isabel is on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School and the Leadership Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. At HKS she has been teaching “Scaling Up for Development Impact” since 2014. She is also a frequent guest analyst of Global CNN Dinero at CNN-Español.