Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Gayle Smith has spent much of her career in international affairs in the field. Smith served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council from 1998-2001, and as Senior Advisor to the Administrator and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 1994-1998. In 1999, she won the National Security Council's Samuel Nelson Drew Award for Distinguished Contribution in Pursuit of Global Peace for her role in the successful negotiation of a peace agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Smith was based in Africa for almost 20 years as a journalist covering military, economic and political affairs for the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Globe & Mail, London Observer and Financial Times. Smith has also consulted for a wide range of NGOs, foundations and governmental organizations including UNICEF, the World Bank, Dutch Interchurch Aid, Norwegian Church Relief, and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation. She won the World Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council and the World Hunger Year Award in 1991.

Smith is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as a member of the Commission on Capital Flows, the Commission on Weak States and National Security and the Council on Foreign Relation’s Africa Task Force.  She serves on the boards of Oxfam America; the Africa America Institute; USA for Africa; and the National Security Network, and is on the advisory boards of DATA, the Global Fairness Initiative and the Acumen Fund. She is a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, where she coauthored The Other War: Global Poverty and the Millennium Challenge Account. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, she served as  Chair of the Global Poverty  Working Group of the Clinton Global Initiative.