Juan Fernando Gomez (JuanFer) is a development practitioner who believes in leveraging the power of technology to eliminate poverty.

As a student in the Global Human Development (GHD) Program at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, JuanFer focuses on social innovation, technology, and quantitative analysis. He is currently consulting with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Lab as part of his Capstone project. His project with the IDB Lab involves supporting product design and scale-up of fAIr Tech Radar, a tool to foster the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Latin American entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Moreover, he is a Research Assistant for the Human Capital Project (HCP) at The World Bank. JuanFer is currently standardizing the Stata code that produces the Human Capital Index (HCI) to make it publicly available on GitHub. In addition, he is optimizing the relationship management and knowledge management systems of the HCP network, which comprises the Ministries of Finance from 85 countries. During the summer of 2022, he worked with the IOM-UN Migration country office in The Gambia, introducing tools and techniques to tell migrant stories with data.

Before GHD, JuanFer led the global team scaling up the Poverty Stoplight (PS). A social innovation based in Paraguay, the PS uses technology to allow program beneficiaries from organizations in more than 40 countries to self-assess and design their own path out of poverty. Under his leadership, the PS global team balanced commercial and social goals, testing different business models that doubled projected revenues while enabling more than 60,000 households to benefit from the PS worldwide. In addition, JuanFer coordinated the PS global team efforts in consolidating a community of practice that met regularly to exchange experiences, designed 10+ implementation guidelines, and encouraged direct collaboration among members.

JuanFer graduated magna cum laude with honors in Economics and International Development from Tulane University. He speaks Spanish, English, and French and describes himself as an adventurer and an amateur barista.