Robert Fries

Managing Director, Financial Services

Robert Fries is a senior manager with more than 20 years of experience developing, managing and providing technical support to international development programs. As the head of ACDI/VOCA’s financial services practice area, Mr. Fries oversees management and technical support provided to our financial services programming and identifies and disseminates best practices and products to the development community. He is a thought leader in using the value chain approach in development work and has conducted numerous studies and papers on the framework. Value chain approach papers include “Value Chains and Their Significance for Addressing the Rural Finance Challenge” and “Nature-Oriented Tourism in Ecuador: An Assessment Applying the Value Chain and Nature, Wealth and Power Frameworks.” Mr. Fries has developed and delivered training on incorporating value chain analysis into financial market assessments for outside organizations including USAID and the SEEP Network. Other achievements include co-authoring the publication “Making Rural Financial Institutions Sustainable,” a guidebook on fundamentals of planning, organizing and operating rural financial institutions to assure sustainability; and developing “Basic Guidelines For Effective Rural Finance Projects,” an article on the World Bank’s web-based Guide to Developing Agricultural Markets & Agro-Enterprises. Mr. Fries serves as a board member of three financial institutions, Agrocapital, a rural and microfinance institution in Bolivia; Bai Tushum MCA, a microfinance institution in Kyrgyzstan; and Frontiers, a wholesale lender to microfinance institutions in Central Asia. He earned his master’s degree in public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and his bachelor’s in political science at Boston College. He is fluent in Spanish.