Jenny Baca

Jenny brings her experience in international development, designing and teaching interdisciplinary college courses, and research in South America to support the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) cross-mission learning programs for the USAID Measuring Impact II project. As a Senior Associate with Environmental Incentives, she works with USAID in DC and across the LAC region to identify key knowledge gaps affecting conservation program effectiveness and to design and implement collaborative activities to address those gaps and apply learning.

Prior to joining Environmental Incentives, Jenny worked as a Gender Advisor at USAID’s Office of Food for Peace through a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There, she examined how gender and age dynamics intertwine with resource access and control to affect food insecurity. She has led classes in Geography, Development Studies, and Latin American Studies and conducted field-based independent research in Southern Chile exploring how decision-making over forest resources affected the place of the rural working class in the Chilean nation.

As a political ecologist, Jenny is very excited about initiatives to integrate understandings of social power into biodiversity conservation.