2024 Wharton Award recipient Fenton Sands is an agricultural economist with a BS from Cornell University (1970) and PhD from Michigan State University (1984). After his first job with the USDA, he spent almost 26 years with USAID until he retired in 2007. Since retiring, Dr. Sands has continued his professional commitment to economic development (almost 45 years to date) as a policy and strategic planning consultant to USAID HQs and missions in Guyana, Ghana, and Malawi. Dr. Sands has led a gypsy-lifestyle that he inherited from his parents because his father (with a PhD from Cornell University) was an international agricultural expert who, over a period of many years, lived and worked overseas for several international development organizations. Besides him growing up in Liberia, Nigeria, and Sudan (with his parents and two sisters), Dr. Sands attended high school in both Egypt and Switzerland. Dr. Sands has lived, worked and traveled in almost 20 countries covering the four corners of Africa. He has also traveled to many other countries in Europe and a few countries in the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In particular, after he initially worked for USAID in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his long-term overseas assignments with the Agency continued from there to Uganda to Morocco, to Egypt, then Ghana, and briefly in Washington, DC before going to Guyana in 2005 as the USAID Mission Director. Throughout his career, Dr. Sands has gained broad-based experience and expertise in economic analysis, international country-level and program level policy and strategic design, development economic activity level design and implementation, organizational and program level senior management, etc. Today, Dr. Sands and his wife Cynthia (a professional artist) live in Washington, DC and their sons, Bemani and Jahmal, are the third generation of Sands in the foreign service.
