Name Susan Davis Organizations founded BRAC USA | Role Social entrepreneur | |
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Occupation President and CEO of BRAC USA Books Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know Education Harvard University, University of Oxford, Georgetown University | ||
Susan Davis is an author, public speaker and expert in international development and social entrepreneurship. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University and senior Advisor to New York University's Reynolds program on social entrepreneurship and active on many boards and advisory councils.
Contents
She was the founding president and CEO of BRAC USA, an organization created in 2006 to support BRAC, a position she held until 2016. BRAC runs programs to alleviate poverty using microfinance, education, healthcare, legal services, community empowerment, and other methods.
Career
Davis has been an advisor to New York University's Catherine B. Reynolds Program for Social Entrepreneurship since its inception. Susan taught Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Development in the Spring semester of 2015 at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and will teach at NYU's Reynolds/Stern School program in Spring 2017. Susan led Ashoka's Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship and serves on its international board committee that selects Ashoka Fellows and the Advisory Council of Ashoka U, its program for universities. She also oversaw Ashoka's expansion to the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and served as a Senior Advisor to the Director General of the International Labor Organization. Davis served as the Assistant Director of the first quasi-public export trading company founded by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. She was the executive director of Women's Environment & Development Organization, founded in 1990 by Bella Abzug and Mim Kelber to take action in the United Nations and other international policymaking forums. Prior to that, she led initiatives aimed at scaling up microfinance institutions that were owned and governed by poor women at Women's World Banking and the Ford Foundation in Bangladesh. During her four and half years in Dhaka, she organized the Grameen Bank, BRAC and Proshika donor consortia to scale up microfinance. She was a founding board member and chair of the Grameen Foundation and was a board member there as of 2013. She was also featured in Fast Company's The League of Extraordinary Women list in 2012. Davis was educated at Georgetown (BSFS 1978), Harvard (MPA 1982), and Oxford Universities (MPhil candidate 1980-81).
Publications and appearances
In 2010, Davis co-authored the book Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know with David Bornstein. She has appeared on CNN and ABC News discussing global poverty and health issues. Her work on microfinance and entrepreneurship creation in developing countries has appeared in Innovations, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and other publications. In 2013, she delivered a Frank Rhodes lecture as part of "Creation of the Future: A Lecture Series for a New American University" at Arizona State University.