Mentor Spotlight: Carolina Rojas-Hayes, MPP’06

HOMETOWN:

Bogotá, Colombia

CURRENT ROLE:

Senior Executive, Operations Programing Division, CAF, Development Bank of Latin America

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE:

Economics, University of the Andes - Bogotá

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT:

• Consultant, Inter-American Development Bank, Washington D.C.
• Consultant, Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank, Washington D.C.
• Head, Multilateral and Bilateral Debt, Public Credit Directorate, Ministry of Finance (Colombia)
• Promotion Manager promoted to Vice President, National Mining Agency (Colombia)

Following the 2008 financial crisis, international markets around the world were reeling. At about the same time, Carolina Rojas-Hayes was leaving her job at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. to return to her native Colombia to work in the central government.

She landed a position at the Ministry of Finance, where she led a team that would help decide Colombia’s fate in navigating the crisis, particularly how it would provide adequate funding to sustain the country’s programs and services. Rojas-Hayes was in charge of negotiations on loans with bilateral and multilateral development banks and other institutions.

“I always thought that my role to tap into these resources was important to fund these programs that went to the people,” she says. “If I didn’t do my job right then there wouldn’t be the resources, or we’d have funding at a very expensive rate. So you were always trying to get the best deal on that money so, as Colombians, we wouldn’t have to spend those all on interest and instead use them for things that were more useful, such as health and infrastructure.”

The role took her to meetings across the globe as she negotiated with potential investors, sought bonds, and made the case about why Colombia was a viable investment. Part of the puzzle she had to figure was what factors were driving decision-making as she weighed players’ incentives.

Rojas-Hayes, MPP’06, says her graduate studies prepared her for that moment. She remembers one country that wanted to offer Colombia resources.

“I understood it was in their interest to lend to Colombia,” she says. “That allowed us to do a very good negotiation on that loan. I realized it, and that gave us larger negotiation power. Those are things I didn’t recognize before I went to Harris.”

Once the crisis passed, Rojas-Hayes says she was proud that “things went well for the country” and that it was able to open different sources of funding that are still used today.

Rojas-Hayes’ career has taken her around the world and to many rural parts of her own country in the public sector and bilateral and multilateral organizations. Today she serves as a senior executive in the Operations Programming Division for CAF - Development Bank of Latin America, where her work includes ensuring that the bank’s loans help countries achieve their development strategies.

In her spare time, she also serves as a mentor in the Harris Mentor Program, where she enjoys talking with students about the importance of working in the public sector and providing career guidance to students, particularly those from South America.

“I think it’s important for South American students to have a perspective of where the Harris degree takes you in your home country,” says Rojas-Hayes, who communicates with mentees by phone and email.

While at Harris, Rojas-Hayes was passionate about creating community and supporting students from Latin America. In 2005, she recalls one of the “best things that happened to me at Harris.”

Over lunch, a small group of Latin American students began thinking of ways to represent their countries and the policy issues they were seeing back home. Her class included 10 Latin American students, who were becoming her family. They wanted a way to formally share more cultural aspects of their countries, too.

They decided to found a registered Harris Student Organization: Latin America(n) Matters (LAM).

“We thought there was an opportunity to showcase Latin America’s policy issues with the UofC community,” she says. “We thought we had critical mass to make this happen.”

Once LAM was born, the group began leveraging their relationships to bring in guest speakers over brown bag lunches. As they thought they would be, those relationships were lasting.

In 2017, some of the classmates met in Chile for a LAM reunion.

“Everyone has these amazing careers and we were learning about what everyone was doing.”

Since its founding, LAM guests to the University of Chicago include government and private sector officials from across Latin America. In 2017, members celebrated the fifth anniversary of LAM’s Latin American Policy Forum, a venue for undergraduate and graduate students to hear about key policy issues from notable Latin American policymakers and leaders. Today, LAM’s membership includes about 130 students.

Rojas-Hayes says she’s proud of the organization’s longevity and what it has become.

“Not even in my wildest dreams did we think it was going to be such a big thing and last so long,” she says.