Edith Wilson

Edith Wilson

Communication is Innovation

Edie Wilson specializes in how strategic communication and partnerships can be deployed to accelerate the speed and deepen the impact of innovation in international development. For Development Marketplace's tenth anniversary year, this means finding new ways to engage with social media, reach non-traditional audiences, create new combinations of multi-media content, and empower all the winners, finalists and participants to present their innovative solutions to a global audience. Edie understands where many of the finalists are coming from -- she grew up in a family passionate about both international development and hi-tech venture startups, and lived and traveled in Ethiopia. At age 21, she became a social entrepreneur herself, launching an advocacy NGO on food and hunger issues in the United States and raising funds for a small staff and program.  Since then, she's worked in senior positions in government, the private sector and civil society. For the past ten years, she's been an advisor at the World Bank, specializing in multi-stakeholder processes. governance and anti-corruption, and economic reform.  She holds a Masters in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she met her husband Ron Seckinger, and speaks French and more Spanish than she generally admits.