Harriet C. Babbitt

Former U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States, United States

Bio

Harriet (Hattie) Babbitt is an attorney in Washington, D.C., where she provides counsel at the intersection of law, policy, and public interest.

Babbitt serves on a number of not-for-profit and for-profit boards. She is chair of the United States Water Partnership (USWP), co-chair of the Global Water Challenge (GWC); serves as vice-chair of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the World Resource Institute (WRI), and Population Action International (PAI); and serves on the boards of The Water Initiative (TWI) and the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) at Georgetown University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

From 1997 to 2001 Babbitt served as Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. As the second most senior official for U.S. foreign assistance programs, she oversaw programs in the fields of democratization, humanitarian relief, women’s empowerment, climate change, economic growth, education, health, and the environment. Her responsibilities included oversight of USAID efforts to assist post-conflict reconstruction in the Balkans and East Timor. Babbitt served at the Department of State from 1993 to 1997 as U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States. While in that role she led the U.S. negotiating effort to complete the world’s first anti-corruption convention and worked to strengthen the Inter-American Human Rights Commission and Inter-American cooperation against arms trafficking.

Ambassador Babbitt also served as a Senior Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and spent 20 years as a litigation attorney in Arizona.

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