Kaci Kennedy McDade is a senior advisor at GHV. She supports the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Policy, Advocacy, and Communications team. She specializes in development policy, policy-oriented research, finance, and project management.

Kaci’s global health and development experience spans philanthropy, academia, and international organizations. Before joining GHV in 2024, she was an associate economic affairs officer at the United Nations Secretariat where she provided sustainable development financing expertise for UN leaders and supported intergovernmental processes related to financing for sustainable development.

Previously, Kaci was an academic researcher at Duke University, where she wrote more than 60 published works on global health policy and financing, engaged with policymakers in low- and middle-income countries, and managed research partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa. She began her career at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on the Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health team, where she honed her expertise in project management and stakeholder engagement.

Kaci holds a MPA in international development from Tsinghua University in Beijing and a BA from the College of William & Mary. During her academic training, she was an intern with the US State Department, the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

She lives in New York City with her husband, two daughters, and pup.

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Areas of Expertise:

• Project management

• Strategy

• Qualitative and quantitative research

• Issue experience in gender equality, maternal newborn and child health, health financing, Chinese foreign policy and development finance, and development policy and finance