Paige Alexander

Chief Executive Officer, The Carter Center

Paige Alexander
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Paige Alexander is the chief executive officer of The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter to advance peace and health worldwide. The Center has helped improve people’s lives in over 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights, and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care.

Before joining The Carter Center, Alexander had a distinguished global development career, with more than two decades of experience in the government and nonprofit sectors. She has held senior leadership positions at two regional bureaus of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), covering missions and development programs in 25 countries.

Between 1993 and 2001, Alexander was USAID’s deputy for the Europe region, focusing on immediate post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans. She held several roles in the Bureau for Europe and the Newly Independent States Task Force, including chief of staff, acting director for the Democracy and Governance Office, Bosnia Task Force deputy director, and country desk officer. After leaving for 10 years to work in a leadership role in the nonprofit sector, Alexander returned to USAID in 2011 in the Senate-confirmed position of assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia; in 2015, she was again confirmed to lead the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Bureau, overseeing 1,000 employees, programs in 12 countries, and more than $1.4 billion in annual funding.

Between her assignments with USAID, Alexander was senior vice president and European founder/president of IREX (2001-2010), an international civil society, democracy, and education nonprofit organization. From 2017 until her appointment to The Carter Center, she served as executive director of the European Cooperative for Rural Development (EUCORD) in Brussels and Amsterdam, working to bring market-led solutions to marginalized farmers in Africa to improve the livelihoods of families and communities sustainably.

Earlier, Alexander was associate director of Project Liberty at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government (1992-1993) and a consultant to institutions including the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Open Society Institute in Prague. She has served on many global boards and committees, including the advisory boards for World Learning and IREX. Alexander currently serves on the boards of the Romanian American Foundation, the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, the ADL Southeast Region, and the Free Russia Foundation, and as an advisory board member of several human rights organizations.

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