Dana Olds is the Chief of Party for the Strengthening Political Landscape (SPL) program in Bangladesh. She is an international development expert skilled in leading large-scale democracy and governance projects. Her technical areas of expertise include: local governance, women’s empowerment, social accountability, capacity building, civic education, community driven development, elections support, civil society development, decentralization, basic services improvement in education, health and water, youth leadership development, organizational and program assessment, qualitative research, stabilization, strategic planning, and proposal development. She has managed single and multi-donor programming funded by USAID, UKAid, CIDA, and GIZ.

Ms. Olds has twenty years of project development and management experience in the U.S., Africa, Afghanistan, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Haiti. She has served as Director of Governance Programs for the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in leadership positions with IFES and Chemonics International, Inc. Ms. Olds has conducted numerous consulting assignments with clients such as AECOM, Never Again Rwanda, and the World Bank to name a few. Ms. Olds is also co-founder of One World Exchange, a non-profit organization that provides service internships in international human rights and international development for college students of under-represented backgrounds. She is also a returned Peace Corps Senegal Volunteer.

Ms. Olds earned a B.A. in International Relations and Japanese from Lincoln University and she holds a master’s degree in Public Administration from Rutgers University. She was also a visiting fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Ms. Old’s article “Microcredit, Social Capital, and Politics: The Case of a Small Rural Town – Gossas, Senegal” was published in the Journal of Microfinance. She is a fluent French speaker.