Adia Armstrong, the proud daughter of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, was raised in the suburbs of Montreal and Toronto, Canada. Before joining GHD, Adia served as an Associate Program Officer on the Africa team at the Center for International Private Enterprise. In this role, she contributed to projects focused on democratic governance, peacebuilding, the digital economy, women’s economic empowerment, and security and economic policy development across West Africa, the Sahel, Kenya, and Ethiopia. As a 2023 Payne Fellow, she aspires to join the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Foreign Service after completing the GHD program.

In the summer of 2024, Adia worked with USAID's Sahel Regional Office in Dakar, Senegal, supporting Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance initiatives. Her work on USAID’s advocacy program against female genital mutilation and cutting in The Gambia included contributions to monitoring and evaluation, as well as coordinating efforts with UNICEF and UNFPA. Additionally, she traveled to Mauritania to support the launch of environmental resilience programming and helped develop a co-creation process for a regional information manipulation program.

Adia completed her undergraduate studies at Boston University (BU), graduating cum laude with a degree in international relations and minors in history and French. During her time at BU, her passion for international development and humanitarian assistance grew through diverse study abroad and research experiences. These included security and migration studies in Morocco, teaching English and professional development skills to asylum-seekers and refugees, and conducting research on humanitarian engineering interventions for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. She further enriched her education with other abroad programs in Israel/Palestine, Cuba, and France.

Adia’s interests extend beyond her professional pursuits. She enjoys playing and watching sports (especially soccer!), globetrotting, exploring different cuisines, and enthusiastically singing along at concerts.

Why GHD?

Adia chose Georgetown’s GHD program for three key reasons: (1) its location in Washington, D.C., placing her in "the heart of the action" for the development field; (2) its curriculum’s emphasis on building quantitative analysis skills; and (3) the opportunity to learn from professors who are active practitioners, ensuring that the coursework is directly applicable to real-world scenarios.