Katherine Downs
Principal Investment Officer International Finance Corporation (ILC)
(Washington DC, USA)
Katherine Downs is a Principal Investment Officer with the Infrastructure Advisory Services group at the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, where she advises governments in emerging markets throughout the world on public private partnerships in infrastructure.
Prior to joining the IFC in January of 2009, Ms. Downs was a Managing Director in the Latin America group of EMP Global, an emerging markets private equity fund manager based in Washington, DC. In her 12 years at EMP Global, Ms. Downs invested in infrastructure companies throughout Latin America as advisor to the $1 billion AIG-GE Capital Latin American Infrastructure Fund and worked on new fund development for the firm. At EMP Global, Ms. Downs sat on a number of boards of investee companies and worked closely with company management in developing growth strategies and raising financing.
Ms. Downs began her career in the private placement group of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, making private debt and equity investments in US companies from 1986 to 1995. She changed her focus to Latin America after spending a year in Peru on a fellowship with the Peruvian government to analyze the investment policies of the country’s newly-created private pension fund system and working with a small private equity firm on power projects in the Peruvian Andes.
Ms. Downs holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University, a J.D. from Boston University Law School, and an M.B.A. from the Yale School of Management. In 1996, she completed an M.I.P.P. degree in Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where she has also taught a course on Latin American project finance. Ms. Downs holds a Charted Financial Analyst (CFA) designation and is a member of a number of organizations focusing on Latin American finance, politics, and culture.