Daniele Nyirandutiye

Daniele Nyirandutiye is a senior fellow for foreign development assistance at American Progress. Nyirandutiye is a senior policy practitioner with experience spanning the White House National Security Council, nearly two decades at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and private capital markets. She brings a practitioner’s perspective to development policy, with deep expertise at the intersection of foreign assistance and development finance, economic statecraft, and private capital mobilization.

As director for African affairs at the National Security Council, Nyirandutiye advised the president and senior U.S. officials on a range of national security issues, including trade and investment, development assistance, democracy and governance, and public health security. She helped shape U.S. economic engagement with Africa, including doubling funding for the Prosper Africa Initiative. At USAID, she held senior leadership roles across multiple countries and in Washington, D.C. As mission director in Uganda, she led one of the agency’s largest portfolios, overseeing a $500 million annual program and more than 200 staff. She also served as senior adviser to the agency counselor, where she helped operationalize major institutional reforms. She currently serves as partner at Desmos Capital Partners, advising on private capital deployment in emerging and frontier markets through blended finance and public-private partnerships. Her work focuses on how policy and institutional frameworks shape investment and development outcomes. Nyirandutiye is a published author and frequent speaker on the evolution of U.S. development policy, including advancing a “trade through development” framework that links development assistance to long-term economic growth. Her writing has appeared in Semafor Africa and The Africa Report. She holds a master’s in public health from Emory University and dual degrees in premedicine and chemistry from the University of Dayton. She is fluent in French and Kinyarwanda.