Rebekah Smith is LaMP’s co-founder and executive director based in Washington DC. An economist and policy entrepreneur, Rebekah has spent nearly a decade leading efforts to expand the scope and quality of migration pathways.
Since co-founding LaMP in 2020, Rebekah has forged several new agreements both with governments and industry actors to promote labor mobility. In just 5 years, Rebekah has stewarded LaMP through a growth trajectory from a working group based at a think tank to a fully-fledged organization already demonstrating momentum and buy-in in the form of over $10 million committed from external funders and concrete proof of concept opportunities on the ground. In that same time, she has established LaMP as a leading and visionary actor building the movement to expand migration opportunities, demonstrating the ability to become a trusted and influential partner for governments, large retailers, industry actors, and worker representatives.
Before starting LaMP, Rebekah was a Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development, where she pioneered a new approach of plurilateral partnerships between national governments and industries as the solution to unlocking labor mobility. Previously, she was a non-resident fellow at the CGD. Rebekah formerly worked for the World Bank where she designed the bank’s first ever operation intended to facilitate cross-border mobility. Her work there focused on providing technical assistance to government counterparts to strengthen capacity and systems to access international labor markets. Rebekah is now a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow. She has a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies from Ohio Wesleyan University.
