Our People .

Chief of Party David Vaughn

David Vaughn is an attorney with more than 20 years of experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating legal and judicial reform projects throughout Europe and Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. He acted as rule of law advisor for the American Bar Association Central Europe and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA/CEELI) in Kazakhstan, helping to establish a regional bar association, judicial advocacy organization, and legislative drafting office. David also served as deputy chief of party for the USAID Russian-American Judicial Partnership in Moscow, Russia, where he led a variety of judicial reform initiatives. As a director at Chemonics, he supervised and provided technical guidance to rule of law and commercial law reform projects in Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Russia, and Zambia. David also managed as chief of party the USAID Women’s Legal Rights Initiative, a worldwide project that focused on legislative drafting, justice sector enforcement, civil society advocacy, and public awareness activities in Albania, Benin, Guatemala, Madagascar, Rwanda, and regional programs in southern Africa that included Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, and Swaziland. He currently serves as chief of party for the USAID New Justice Program in Kyiv, Ukraine, which focuses on strengthening judicial independence, accountability and transparency, improving court administration, strengthening the quality of legal education, and expanding access to justice and protection of human rights. David holds a J.D. from the American University Washington College of Law, a M.A. in political science with graduate research conducted in Namibia, and a B.A. in Russian from the University of Vermont. He also completed a certificate program in mediating disputes at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He is proficient in Ukrainian and Russian and speaks basic French and Spanish.