Ms. Katherine Marshall

“We need to listen attentively to the voices that are coming from the networks of faith communities. They are the closest to poor communities, and their voices are the ones that the G20… the G8 leaders… and the United Nations need to hear.”
-KATHERINE MARSHALL

Katherine Marshall is Executive Director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, and leads the Religion and Global Development Program at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University as Senior Fellow. She is widely recognized as a global development expert and preeminent thinker working at the intersection of religion, ethics and international development. For the last 40 years, Ms. Marshall has been a passionate champion of the world’s poorest populations, and has worked on a broad spectrum of development projects in Africa, East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Ms. Marshall attended Wellesley College and earned her MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She has authored numerous books about development and religion, including The World Bank: from Reconstruction to Development in Equity and Development and Faith: Where Mind, Heart and Soul work Together.

In 1971, Ms. Marshall began her tenure with the World Bank, for which she currently serves as a senior advisor. For over 35 years, she led a variety of development initiatives in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia, with special emphasis on ethics, values and faith in development work; she served as Country Director for the Sahel Department and for Southern African countries, led the World Bank’s social and policy governance during the crisis years in East Asia, and led numerous task forces addressing conflict resolution, capacity building and governance, the role of women, and issues of leadership.

In addition to her long and distinguished career at the World Bank, Ms. Marshall is an engaged activist and advisor for several non-governmental organizations, and has considerable experience in the field. She has served as member of the Council of 100, a core initiative of the World Economic Forum that aimed to build understanding between Islam and the West, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations. She was a trustee of Princeton University, and serves on the International Development Ethics Association.

Ms. Marshall currently focuses on teaching and research on a wide range of topics at the intersection of development and religion. She leads the Berkley Center’s work on faith-inspired organizations working in development, which involves a series of regional background papers and consultations with academics and practitioners, as well as a series of reviews of specific development topics such as HIV/AIDS, gender and shelter.