Han Sheng Chia is the director of the AI for Global Development Initiative and a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. His work focuses on the application of artificial intelligence to development programs. He also works on improving the use of evidence in development policy and aid sector reform. He was previously a Senior Advisor in USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist, and helped shift the Agency’s spending to more cost-effective, evidence-based interventions.
Prior to USAID, he was Vice President at GiveDirectly, where he led investments to achieve step function change in how the organization delivered cash transfers. Together with government partners and leading academics, he helped bring to market an AI driven approach to contactlessly identify, enroll, and deliver cash aid to hundreds and thousands of families in rural settings during the Covid-19 pandemic. This work has been featured in WIRED, Reuters, BBC and has received awards from the Paris Peace Forum and the UNESCO Netexplo Forum. He was also GiveDirectly’s first Humanitarian Director, where his teams led the delivery of more than $200M in cash transfers to half a million people during the COVID-19 pandemic and other natural disasters. He was previously a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Global Policy Lab.
