Lauren Ropp is Managing Director at I4DI, leading strategy, delivery, and growth. Lauren brings more than 15 years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating social- and environmental-impact initiatives across five continents, with deep expertise as an operator and impact evaluator.

Lauren’s international career began in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps Volunteer, where she transitioned into the NGO sector during the West African Ebola outbreak — running treatment center operations, directing a national eye-care program that prevented blindness in over a thousand Ebola survivors, and leading health systems strengthening and livelihoods work through the post-outbreak recovery period. She then moved into agricultural development at One Acre Fund, serving as Deputy Country Director in Ethiopia, where she oversaw a flagship agroforestry program serving tens of thousands of smallholders, and in Tanzania where she designed and led a randomized controlled trial of an asset-transfer program focused on income and nutrition outcomes for farming families.

From direct implementation, Lauren moved into shaping how large-scale capital gets deployed and measured — running operations for an Africa-focused venture capital fund, and serving as a technical advisor to Prevail Fund, where she helped design the early operational architecture and impact measurement models for “big push” bets in education, climate, and health.

Lauren has led impact-focused engagements with organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Shell Foundation, Mars Inc., Starbucks, IFC, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the U.S. Development Finance Corporation. She holds an M.S. in Development Economics from Georgetown and has published on development effectiveness and AI-enabled evaluation methods. She speaks Krio and Swahili.