Name

Josh Woodard

Josh Woodard

Contact

Regional ICT & Digital Finance Advisor, FHI 360

Josh has over ten years of experience in the international development space, primarily focused on helping people use ICT more effectively to achieve development outcomes. He is currently based in Bangkok from where he works on a number of different activities across Asia. Among those activities, he oversees a $6 million investment from USAID to support the digitization of merchant payments for low-income consumers in India. He also leads a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to identify and support the scale up of high potential digital technologies for positively impacting resilience outcomes.

 

He previously oversaw an effort in Bangladesh that helped to expand uptake of digital financial services in agricultural value chains, which resulted in the digitization of more than $2.7 million in financial services, including payments and credit. He also served as a key technical expert with the FAO and ITU to develop a National e-Agriculture Strategy guide, which he has helped the governments of Sri Lanka and Bhutan to implement. Josh is also the author of a soon-to-be-published module in the World Bank’s ICT for Agriculture e-Sourcebook on ‘Using ICT for Remote Sensing, Crowdsourcing, and Big Data to Unlock the Potential of Agricultural Data.’ He previously led USAID’s FACET project from 2009-2013, which focused on promoting the uptake of ICT in agriculture projects across sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of numerous toolkits on using technology for development, including one on low-cost video specifically, and has conducted trainings on using technology, such as video, for hundreds of people across more than 10 countries globally.