Three Years Later: A Conversation with Gayle E. Smith, the CEO of the ONE Campaign, on Covid-19

Please join the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, for a virtual Smart Women, Smart Power conversation with Gayle E. Smith, the CEO of the ONE Campaign. As we pass the three-year mark since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Kathleen McInnis, Director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative, will sit down with Gayle to discuss her role in leading the U.S. effort to end the global pandemic. Additionally, Gayle will discuss her priorities at the ONE Campaign, including her take on hard and soft power and how it interrelates with gender.

Before her current role, Gayle served as a top advisor on international issues for three American presidents and is one of the world’s leading experts on global development and global health security. She brings unparalleled expertise and an extraordinary network of relationships across the African continent and around the world. In 2021, Smith took on a temporary role at the request of the Secretary of State and served as the U.S. State Department’s Coordinator for Global COVID Response & Health Security.

Prior to joining the ONE Campaign, Smith served as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development; served as Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Development and Democracy at the National Security Council; founded the Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress and co-founded the ENOUGH project and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. Additionally, she served as Special Assistant to President Clinton and Senior Director for African Affairs at the NSC in the late 1990s, and prior to that lived and worked in Africa for 20 years, working as a journalist and with NGOs.

This event is made possible through support from Citi.