Bryan Rhodes

Bryan is an agricultural economist with over 20 years experience in over 70 countries. Bryan uses analytical tools and approaches developed during his first career as an investment banker/managing consultant to the U.S. real estate development industry (see www. rclco.com). Bryan specializes in high-value agriculture (café, cacao, cashew, horticulture), market systems development, value chain strengthening, design and implementation of blended finance facilities, program design and proposal writing (Bryan has written winning proposals now totaling close to $1 billion over the past 8 years for the largest international non-governmental organizations in the world), food security and resilience, natural resource management and sustainable landscapes, and sustainable WASH service provision and finance. **************************************************************************************** Until April 2021, Bryan served as Managing Partner/Founder of Absolute Options, which successfully completed close to 100 projects in more than 50 countries during its ten-year span. Bryan recently left AO to start Intrepid Economics to focus on shared-valued business models, sustainable landscapes, social entrepreneurship and blended finance facilities. Since it's launch in April 2021, Intrepid Economics has been working with USAID to design new approaches to economic growth in the Americas, led the research & analysis for a $100 million new initiative in South East Asia, in addition to advising a number of private sector clients. ***************************************************************************************** Bryan is also a seasoned program evaluator, having recently served as Team Leader for several program evaluations including a Baseline Assessment of WASH services in Kasia Oriental and Lomami for USAID, the Final Evaluation of the USAID/LIFT Agribusiness Finance Program in Myanmar, the Liberia WASH Program, a ten-country baseline assessments of the fertilizer sector in Sub-Saharan Africa for the African Development Bank. Prior to that Bryan designed the 100-million Euro Agriconnect Program in Tanzania for the EU. **************************************************************************************** Bryan led the market and financial feasibility analysis of financing water service delivery in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, which he used to co-design the Azure Water Finance Facility (now Azure Source Capital and Azure Technical Services) together with Paul Hicks of CRS, and its subsequent capitalization and launch. Bryan served as a Director for Azure Source Capital for three years prior to launching new pursuits in greenfield fund development. Bryan also designed a blended finance facility for sustainable WASH service delivery in the DR Congo, which was greenlighted for USAID funding in late 2019 and launched in 2020 in partnership with Chemonics International. **************************************************************************************** Lastly, Bryan conducted his doctoral work in economics and international political economy at UCLA. Bryan pulled a terminal Master's Degree after volunteering for development work in Afghanistan post-911. Bryan is a native English speaker, is fluent in Spanish, and speaks French, Portuguese, Dari, and Japanese.