Richard Newsome was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia. After studying physics at Georgia Tech, he joined the Peace Corps as an education volunteer in Mozambique, teaching physics at a high school in the northern province of Zambezia. Although the global pandemic unfortunately cut Richard’s time with the Peace Corps short, it also spurred his career transition into global development.

After returning from Mozambique, Richard completed the MicroMasters certificate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earning a certificate in Data, Economics, and Development Policy. Additionally, during the pandemic shutdown, Richard coordinated a masking campaign in his former post in Mozambique. Richard later interned at CatComm, a Brazilian nonprofit, where he helped community groups in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas apply for American grant funds to finance solar panel projects. Most recently, between 2021 and 2023, Richard worked at DAI, one of the largest implementing partners of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he was a data analyst.

Throughout his time working in the development sector and studying development policy, Richard has become increasingly motivated by the role that data can bring in implementing effective solutions to challenging development problems. After graduating from the GHD program, he hopes to help members of the development community be most effective in their impact given their limited budgets.

Richard chose GHD because the program prioritizes professional growth and specialization in areas in interest in a way that few other programs do, allowing him to explore his interests in development economics with hands-on experience.

Summer Internship

Over the past summer, I worked as a visiting researcher for the FGV EESP CLEAR, the portion of the Global Evaluation Initiative focusing on Portuguese-speaking Africa and Brazil, based out of São Paulo. Working with CLEAR, I headed a rapid evaluation of the Garantia Safra program, a government-subsidized agricultural insurance for family farmers in Brazil’s northeast. My evaluation included reviewing documents published by the government and secondary sources regarding the program’s design and historical successes and challenges, as well as personally sourcing and analyzing data necessary for contextualizing the program. Additionally, while at CLEAR, I helped the organization consider strategies for supporting Brazilian microentrepreneurs in their work with the bank Santander, both by conducting a literature review on such strategies and by scraping and analyzing data regarding Brazilian microentrepreneurs. Nearly all of my work, including meetings within CLEAR, resources used, and outputs produced, were conducted or written in Portuguese.