Rebecca Chandler Leege
Rebecca Chandler Leege is Worldreader’s new Chief Executive Officer. From 2018-2023, Rebecca led Worldreader’s impact across the globe as Chief Impact Officer, helping the nonprofit reach over 22 million readers and transforming the organization’s strategy to be laser-focused on getting children reading across under-resourced communities.
Rebecca grew up as a citizen of the world, from Senegal, West Africa, to Europe and East Asia. Throughout her career, she gained more than 25 years of global leadership experience as she served in a variety of leadership roles to improve the lives of children around the world, including fragile contexts. Her people-centered approach allowed her to attract talent and build high-performing global and local teams while fostering creative collaborations, cross-sector partnership mobilization, and strategic vision.
As co-leader of the global All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development, now one of the longest running edtech innovation efforts across the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Rebecca oversaw the development and incubation of hundreds of innovative edtech solutions to address the complex barriers to child literacy for the most vulnerable children and families in the world. Developed with a wide range of partners, including local community based organizations and multilateral institutions, donor governments and private corporations, these innovations have resulted in some hundreds of thousands of vulnerable children globally accessing critical early literacy tools in their own languages. As Director of Child Protection, Gender, and Education, at World Vision, she led a team working to reduce gender barriers and inequities and child labor/trafficking across the fishing and cocoa sectors. Rebecca also worked with World Relief in Rwanda as their Director of Programs before relocating to their headquarters as Director of Global Program Operations, covering complex international relief and development operations from Mongolia to Haiti.
Before choosing the humanitarian path, Rebecca spent six years in the private sector, beginning with Ernst & Young, an international human resources consulting firm with Fortune 500 companies.
Rebecca holds a Master of Science in Multinational Commerce from Boston University; a Bachelor of Arts, Political Science from Taylor University; a Product Strategy Business Certificate from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management; a Graduate Certificate in Early Grade Reading from the University of Massachusetts; a Certificate of Languages in French, from L’Université de Paris, La Sorbonne.
She resides in Atlanta, GA with her family, and is always ready for a cup of coffee.
As an avid reader, Rebecca chooses books that open up new worlds and provide strategic insights in leadership. She recently completed The Nature Fix by Florence Williams and Brick by Brick by David Robertson. She invites everyone to read The Story of You, by Lisa Ann Scott and illustrated by Sue Cornelison on BookSmart.
