Deputy Country Representative, Sri Lanka

Diana Fernandez is the deputy country representative for Sri Lanka, where she oversees civil society support programming in the areas of governance and social cohesion. She also provides support and oversight to the Foundation’s programming and office in the Maldives.

Fernandez previously served as the project director for the South Asia Governance Fund, which provides civil society capacity building and grant support to organizations in Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. She was also the deputy country representative for The Asia Foundation’s Myanmar and Mongolia offices. Where she oversaw and managed a wide range of programs and projects ranging from local governance to women’s economic empowerment. Fernandez has been working with The Asia Foundation in different capacities since 2007 across offices and Foundation priority issue areas.

Fernandez also provided substantive program support to the Afghanistan office to revise Afghanistan’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs communications strategy, as well as drafting a large public-sector proposal to enhance the capacity of subnational governments. Between 2009 and 2013, she was a program officer in the Foundation’s Nepal office, where she had a diverse portfolio that included: managing a DFID-funded project to mobilize 50 international election observers and more than 8000 national election observers for Nepal’s 2013 Constituent Assembly Elections, managing trafficking in persons projects, and managing a gender-based violence research project for the Office of the Prime Minister of Nepal.

Education: Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania