Mark Andrew Meassick was sworn in as Mission Director of USAID Kenya and East Africa in June 2018.  He has worked for USAID in various capacities since 2005, most recently as the USAID Uganda Mission Director.

A Senior Foreign Service Officer, Mark joined USAID/Afghanistan in 2005, where he created new programs for rural finance and small and medium enterprise development, the two largest such USAID programs in the world at the time.  In late 2006, he went to Juba, Southern Sudan to open the USAID Mission Program Office after a decade of closure. He later became the first Supervisory Program Officer to be based in Khartoum with a staff of one, supporting an $800 million program.  In September 2008, he became the Supervisory Program Officer for USAID Kenya’s $480M program, and in 2013 assumed the position of USAID Uganda Deputy Mission Director. In 2016, he became the Mission Director of USAID Uganda.

Mark started his career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Swaziland and served as a contractor for USAID in Lesotho in 1986-87. For the next 17 years he worked in Latin America, first co-founding an NGO in Nicaragua focused on capacity building in community empowerment, leadership training and gender equity,and then working for the Organization of American States (OAS) in the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) from 1993-2005.  In his time with the OAS, he carried out policy work on rural development and poverty reduction throughout the Americas.

Mark was born in Charlotte, North Carolina.   He received his BA from Wake Forest University, and earned an MBA and MEd from University of Massachusett-Amherst. He is fluent in Spanish.