Meet New CAI Board Member, Ambassador Jimmy Kolker
By Tonya Andrews
Jimmy Kolker has spent a career shaping decisions where the stakes were measured in lives— as a U. S. ambassador, as one of the people who helped shape the President ' s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief( PEPFAR) in its earliest days, as a policy leader at UNICEF and on the
governing bodies of the World Health Organization. When asked what drew him, at this stage of his career, to a small nonprofit focused on educating girls in the Hindu Kush, his answer wasn ' t about prestige or scale. It was about gaps. " I wanted to fill gaps that I saw from my experience in the U. S. government and multilateral organizations— gaps the existing aid programs were neglecting," he said. " Central Asia Institute( CAI) is about people who have difficulty accessing services that most of us take for granted."
Kolker grew up a self-described " homebody Midwesterner " in St. Louis, collecting stamps and loving geography, with no particular international pedigree. A college fellowship took him to Africa for a year after he graduated from Minnesota ' s Carleton College, and it changed the course of his life. He took the Foreign Service exam half expecting nothing to come of it. Instead, it launched a decades long career representing the United States abroad— including as an ambassador from 1999 to 2005, a period he calls the high-water mark of American diplomatic influence— and led to positions at the center of the U. S. and global response to HIV / AIDS, Ebola, Zika and COVID-19.
The pull of Africa never really left him. " Landing in Africa was usually like hearing my favorite song on the radio," Kolker said. " Wow, oh yeah, I remember how good I felt when I last heard this song, when I last had this experience of breathing the warm air and feeling like I could make a difference."
Ambassador Jimmy Kolker
He describes the sounds, the smells, the blast of humidity as he stepped off the plane, bringing back a rush of good memories— " and energy." That pull— toward new places, new people, new questions— has followed him ever since.
Now retired from government service, Kolker has chosen his board seats carefully. CAI, he said, appealed to him for reasons both professional and personal. His wife, Britt- Marie, a Swedish politician, was an active member of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s— one of the young voices in Swedish politics advocating for the country and its people.
" We ' ve always talked about Afghanistan, the role of women in Afghanistan," Kolker said. " Education for girls there was important to Britt-Marie already 40 years ago, and has remained something we ' ve been interested in."
When CAI approached him about joining the board, he suspected it was his title and his years in the policy world that caught the organization ' s attention. But of all the boards he sits on, he ' s quick to point out, this is the one his wife is most eager to hear about. The couple keeps in touch with people who have left Afghanistan but remain invested in what organizations like CAI are trying to accomplish there.
" This isn ' t an academic interest," Kolker said. " This is something we really see as a political and personal priority— for all of us, really, but it has been for our family."
Ask Kolker how he connects the dots between girls ' education and long-term stability, and he doesn ' t reach for a talking point. He reaches for a story from his time as ambassador to Uganda. A Fulbright scholar came to study which interventions most improved rural household income: better farm-to-market roads, fertilizer, health care access, girls ' education or something else? On its own, girls ' education wasn ' t the intervention that moved the needle most. Rural electrification was.
" If people had electricity in their homes, their income increased more than due to any other of those factors," Kolker explained. Children could study after dark. Women earned income from sewing, hairdressing or cooking in the few discretionary hours they had. Household tasks became less time-consuming for the whole family.
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