David Riveros García

David Riveros García is a Master’s of Public Administration candidate and a Gleitsman Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has a Master’s degree in Development Studies as a Chevening Scholar at The London School of Economics and is currently an ASAP Fellow at Yale’s Global Justice Program. David is the founder and Executive Director of reAcción, an innovation and community-centered anti-corruption organization in Paraguay. 

The son of a former shoe-shine boy and a girl adopted from the streets, he founded reAcción at age 17 after leading a mass demonstration mobilizing over 3,000 students from public high schools for almost a month. Before he was 22, David co-founded an international anti-corruption network incubated by the World Bank and presented at the World Economic Forum, the International Anti-Corruption Conference, and the WB-IMF Annual Meetings. He was distinguished as a Youth Ambassador by the U.S. State Department, a Global Changemaker by the British Council, and a Peace Ambassador by the European Commission. His projects have reformed national policies related to public procurement in education and contributed to a five-fold increase in the correct allocation of funds for school infrastructure in Paraguay’s richest city.

David is an Ashoka Fellow, a European Union’s EUVP alumnus, and an international Open Contracting Champion. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Financial Times, the BBC, Global Citizen, and El País. He has consulted on social accountability, civic technology, open government, and youth political participation for the World Bank, USAID, Transparency International, and International IDEA. He is a former board member of the World Youth Movement for Democracy and designer of FOCO, an app that enables the real-time monitoring of the national investment in school infrastructure and meals and he led the development of Paraguay’s Healthcare Ministry’s open data mobile app. 

As a Cheng Fellow, David aims to distill and improve the mechanisms that have made his combination of civic tech and grassroots mobilization effective in reducing corruption. This will enable him to scale his organization’s work internationally to influence change in the way anti-corruption is approached in international development.