Amanda Grossi
ACToday Country Manager (Senegal and Ethiopia) & Senior Staff Associate
Amanda Grossi received her B.S. in Environmental Science and B.A. in Political Science from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2011. After graduating from UCLA, Amanda served in the Peace Corps as an agroforestry extension agent in rural Senegal from 2011-2013, which jumpstarted her interest in sustainable development and led her to pursue her Masters of Public Administration in Development Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs—a program emphasizing holistic, multidisciplinary, and systems-level approaches to international development.
Throughout her graduate experience and thereafter, Amanda has worked on a wide array of projects and initiatives with organizations such as the World Agroforestry Center, the Earth Institute Agriculture and Food Security Center, the Clinton Foundation, Plan International, Building Tomorrow, and CNFA in various research, business development, and communications capacities, but her passion and focus have always been on the rural communities and people who initially sparked her interest in development, especially children and youth.
Having lived and worked for over five years in various places across both East and West Africa—including Senegal, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania—Amanda now applies this experience as the ACToday Country Manager for Ethiopia and Senegal. In this role, she provides critical support to the delivery of current and new capacity building initiatives and coordinates all aspects of ACToday’s activities in Africa. In doing so, she also contributes to the management and scale-up of the Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative led by IRI.