Zoë Reiter

Director, Combating Kleptocracy

Zoë Reiter serves as NED’s first combating kleptocracy director. In this role, Reiter leads the design and implementation to a “whole of NED” approach for supporting civil society around the world to detect, deter and dismantle kleptocratic systems. She brings more than fifteen years of experience to the role – working with pro-democracy organizations to build resilient and impactful strategies to fight kleptocracy and transnational corruption.

In 2019, she co-founded the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), an international coalition that brings together leading journalists, data analysts, academics, and policy advocates to expose transnational corruption flows and push for policy change. From 2019 through 2023, she also served as director of strategic initiatives at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), where she led work to strengthen US systems against money-laundering and malign foreign influence. Reiter was previously based in Berlin, where she worked for 12 years at the global secretariat of Transparency International (TI), the global anti-corruption movement, leading various multi-country programs and working closely with anti-corruption activists from Latin America to Eastern Europe to West Africa. For example, Reiter led the design and implementation of a program with nine Latin American and African chapters of TI, together with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to make criminal justice systems more resistant to capture by organized crime and corrupt interests. In her last two years at TI, she led the re-establishment of the US office of TI. Reiter also brings over a decade of experience working in philanthropy as a consultant to The Ford Foundation.

Reiter holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies from Rice University, joint master’s degrees in Latin American studies and community and regional planning from the University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Columbia University.