Colin Christensen

Colin has spent his career with organizations committed to innovative, impact-focused approaches to international development. He has worked with One Acre Fund since 2015; until 2019 he led the Government Relations department, based out of Kigali, ensuring close collaboration with governments in the nine countries where One Acre Fund works. He then moved to the Washington, DC area as One Acre Fund’s global policy director. In this role, he leads policy advocacy to bring more attention to the needs of smallholder farmers, often through active engagement with like-minded coalitions like the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and the Alliance to End Hunger. He has helped develop One Acre Fund’s external climate policy strategy, writing articles and co-leading the organization’s delegations to relevant events, like the climate COPs, to highlight policy gaps limiting the scalability, sustainability, and impact of climate interventions. Before One Acre Fund he lived in Nairobi and worked as the government relations director for New Globe, which runs low-cost private schools. Earlier, he was the country director for Innovation for Poverty Action in Kenya, which conducts rigorous impact evaluations of projects to assess which actually work to solve development problems. Colin has an MA in international development from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a BA in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He has spent most of his life in east and southern Africa, but now lives in Takoma Park, Maryland with his wife and two kids.