Eric V. Guichard is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Homestrings, a global investment engagement platform that facilitates diaspora investments into the investors’ countries of origin. It uses medium-term diaspora bonds backed by the US government to finance key development projects and small businesses in Africa and Eastern Europe. Guichard is also founder and chairman of GRAVITAS Capital, an investment transaction structuring firm which links performance-based reserves management to capacity building and has advised over $100 billion in sovereign mandates since 1999.

Guichard has also advised the Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, World Bank, Indonesia, Jamaica, Haiti, Ukraine, and ten other sovereign clients on diaspora-led investments. Prior to private-sector stints with GRAVITAS and Homestrings, Guichard was a staffer at the World Bank treasury (from 1990 to 1996), managing several foreign exchange portfolios.

Guichard has authored reports on diaspora bonds in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, in addition to reports with Asian Development Bank, and analysis on intellectual property rights with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

Guichard received a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School where he was a World Bank scholar and recipient of a Harvard fellowship award. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Duquesne University and a Diplôme Universitaire de Technologie from Cheik Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal where he played Division I basketball.

Guichard sits on the board of several organizations including the United Nations’ International Organization on Migration’s iDiaspora.org platform, the University of Maryland’s Business School Advisory Committee, and Evermore, an organization seeking to enhance US policies around grieving. He speaks English and French and lives in Washington, DC, with his family.