Paula Garcia Tufro is an experienced professional with deep expertise in international development, trade and investment. From 2009 to 2017, she served in the United States Government under the Obama Administration as a member of the National Security Council (NSC), and in leadership roles at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the Department of Commerce.
Ms. Tufro is deputy director in the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center of the Atlantic Council. Most recently, Ms. Tufro served as Director for Development and Democracy at the NSC, where she advised senior White House officials on a broad range of U.S. foreign policy and global development policies and programs. In this role, she led coordination of policy positions and multilateral negotiations of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, which set forth a new 15-year global development agenda. She has also led efforts to leverage critical partnerships, as well as U.S. development finance and risk mitigation tools, to catalyze private sector investment for sustainable development. She led strategy and implementation of the Power Africa initiative, and helped mobilize more than $54 billion in external commitments from more than 140 public and private sector partners to help advance the goal of doubling access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Ms. Tufro also served as a member of the Group of Twenty (G-20) negotiating team and lead coordinator for the G-20 Development Working Group.
Prior to joining the NSC, Ms. Tufro was Deputy Chief of Staff at OPIC, the U.S. Government’s development finance institution, where she worked to reduce risk and mobilize private capital in emerging markets to solve critical development challenges. In this role, she served as a trusted adviser to OPIC’s President & CEO and a member of the executive leadership team, providing guidance on agency management, corporate strategy, operations, and policy matters during a period of significant growth. Ms. Tufro also served as Director of Advance at the Department of Commerce, where she led the planning and execution of domestic events and international summits, and helped advance U.S. Government trade and investment priorities. Prior to serving in the U.S. Government, she worked at Freedom House and Arnold & Porter LLC. She is currently a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ms. Tufro holds a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, with a concentration on International Development, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from James Madison University. She is a native English and Spanish speaker, and is proficient in French.