Maria Cecilia Romano

Maria Cecilia Romano joined RTI in October 2024 as a Research Governance Specialist in RTI’s International Development Group. She is an experienced technical writer and has experience in subcontracts management, partnership development, and project start-ups and evaluations. Prior to joining RTI, Ms. Romano worked for several international and domestic nonprofit organizations on projects related to education, workforce development (skills training and youth employment), migrant rights, and patient-centered health research. She has also worked for UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), DAI, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS). 

At DAI, she supported a $71 million portfolio of USAID-funded contracts, including a transparency and public financial management project in Kosovo and a local governance project in Honduras. She managed project budgets and forecasting, reviewed all technical and financial reports, liaised between home office and project teams to troubleshoot implementation challenges, and ensured program operations were in accordance with DAI and USAID regulations.

At CRS, Ms. Romano was initially the International Development Fellow in Cameroon. During her Fellowship, she supported projects funded by a wide variety of donors— GIZ, KfW, UNICEF, McGovern Dole, USDA, and private foundations— and later served as interim project manager for USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA)’s Anglophone Crisis Emergency Response project, a $2.3M food security intervention in the country’s northwest region. At the end of the Fellowship, Ms. Romano joined CRS Honduras as the Program Manager for Program Quality, Learning, and Grants Management. In this position, she worked to advance localization by introducing a year-long training series (12 workshops) for 51 Honduran NGOs and municipal governments to strengthen their capacity to access and implement direct USAID funding. In Honduras, Ms. Romano also designed an accountability mechanism to collect, analyze, and respond to direct feedback from project participants across the entire country program’s portfolio of projects.    

An Argentine native, Ms. Romano speaks fluent Spanish and is proficient in French.