Gregory Kearns
- Areas of Expertise
- Africa
- Angola
- Benin
- Burkina Faso
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Cote d’Ivoire
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Ethiopia
- Experts
- Ghana
- Kenya
- Leadership Team
- Mauritania
- Mozambique
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia/ Somaliland
- Sudan
- Tanzania
- The Gambia
- Togo
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
Gregory Kearns brings 25 years of international humanitarian and development experience, both as an expatriate having lived and worked for ten years in South Sudan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Vietnam, as well as a U.S.-based Director and Vice-President leading teams engaging in policy, strategy, business development and provision of programmatic and technical support for portfolios worth more than $750 million.
Kearns’ leadership track record includes having managed 75 professional full-time expatriate staff (both technical and non-technical), more than 500 national staff (in South Sudan, Bosnia and Vietnam) and overseeing annual operational budgets as high as $200 million from a number of European donors, USAID, U.S. Department of State, World Bank, UNICEF and UNHCR. A significant part of each job was a focus on developing and coaching expatriate and national staff for leadership positions.
Additionally, Kearns’ project management work has yielded an extensive network with a wide variety of stakeholders, including governments, communities, civil society organizations, and bilateral and multi-lateral partners. Kearns’ career has also emphasized the monitoring and evaluation of programs to glean best-practices and lessons learned. For instance, he has conducted impact evaluations in Albania, Ingushetia, Vietnam, South Sudan, Kenya, and the West Bank. Kearns project management and implementation experiences have informed the latter half of his career in business development.
His work has a high capture-rate with bilateral/multi-lateral donors (USAID, EC, SIDA, UNHCR), large corporations (e.g. Starbucks, Keurig Green Mountain, Blommer), leading foundations (e.g. MasterCard, Kellogg, Gates, and Margaret A. Cargill), as well as high net-worth individuals. This combination of technical, programmatic, and resource mobilization experience has helped to grow and improve the organizations with which he has worked. Over the course of his career, Kearns has obtained and managed more than $500 million in donor funding, including more than 100 grants, contracts and cooperative agreements from USAID, Department of State, and Department of Labor.
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