Jessica Berlin is a foreign policy analyst, founder of CoStruct, and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors at the pan-African fintech company Bridge Technologies. She previously lived and worked in Afghanistan, China, Myanmar, Rwanda, the UK, including with the US Senate, US Department of Defense, and the German development agency. Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Jessica has emerged as a prominent German foreign policy commentator. Her analyses have been featured by DW News, BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, ZDF, ARD, France 24, Tagesspiegel, NZZ, Bild, et al.
The first half of Jessica's cross-cutting career was spent working with government agencies, think tanks, and NGOs on security, foreign policy, and economic development. Following these formative experiences she decided to pave her own way, founding the strategy consultancy CoStruct to build bridges between the public and private sector to scale sustainable business and technology solutions in developing and emerging markets. Over the past 9 years as founder and managing director of CoStruct, Jessica has advised government agencies, foundations, tech companies, and investment funds in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, and was co-founder of the MakerNet digital distributed manufacturing alliance.
In the lead up to and aftermath of the 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban, Jessica paused her CoStruct work to voluntarily assist evacuation efforts for her friends, former colleagues, and other Afghans who had worked with international organizations. This crisis was closely followed by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in winter 2022, during which Jessica again voluntarily mobilized evacuation and crisis response efforts. Since spring 2022, Jessica put her normal work on hold to devote herself full time to supporting Ukrainian victory efforts. Her work for Ukraine was profiled by the German paper Berliner Zeitung.
A frequent public speaker, her TEDx on the transatlantic democratic crisis has been described as "one of the most powerful and inspiring TED talks.” She holds an MSc in Political Economy of Emerging Markets from King’s College London and a BA in International Relations from Tufts. At Tufts Jessica was a freshman member of the 2004-2005 EPIIC Colloquium and engaged member of the IGL community. She went to South Africa for a symposium on international conflict resolution and the UAE for a women's rights conference; organized and led a five-student team independent research project to Rwanda; was a member of NIMEP; and co-founded the Tufts Collaborative on Africa, a student group focused on African politics.