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Jamie M. Zimmerman is Director of the Global Assets Project at the New America Foundation.  The project aims to inform and stimulate global asset-building innovations among the increasingly integrated areas of financial access, financial education, social policy, and commercial financial services. Ms. Zimmerman directs the project’s various efforts to advance savings and asset-building policies and initiatives around the world.  Her current areas of focus include, but are not limited to: savings-linked conditional cash transfers, child and youth savings policies, foreign aid reform, communities of practice on savings products for the poor, and the role of technology in asset building and development.  

Ms. Zimmerman speaks frequently on asset building and global development, both domestically and abroad, and her writing has appeared in such various outlets as Yale Global, Enterprise Development & Microfinance, Human Rights Quarterly, the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy Magazine and AOL News.

Previously, Ms. Zimmerman was the Associate Director of Globalization Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, where she managed research and outreach efforts for projects aimed at building awareness of the relationship between international trade, human rights, and corporate social responsibility. That research lead to the 2007 book Trade Imbalance: the Struggle to Weigh Human Rights Concerns in Trade Policymaking, which Ms. Zimmerman co-authored with Dr. Susan Aaronson.

Internationally, she has worked as an international trade consultant in São Paulo, Brazil, and with nonprofit micro-enterprise development groups in Urubamba, Peru. She is a graduate of the University of Kentucky, where she also earned a master’s degree in international political economy and international development from the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce.