Catalina Garcia is the Global Director of Corporate Affairs at Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), Board Director of the AB InBev Foundation, and member of the ABI Women’s Leadership Program, an experience she shares by mentoring other women in the company. Born and raised in Colombia, she graduated from the Javeriana University in Bogota’s Industrial Engineering program and has worked with several multinational companies across different industries (SABMiller, BHP Billiton, IBM, and LLYC). For over 20 years, she has combined her strong people skills and ability to lead multifunctional teams in complex sociopolitical environments with her engineering mindset to build strategic partnerships with Fortune 500 companies, social marketing associations, NGOs, universities, and many others. These include the United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank, International Road Federation, Georgetown University, Harvard, Rockefeller Foundation, ABI Marketing, and Business Fights Poverty. 

Garcia currently leads the AB InBev Global Corporate Affairs team, with most of her work centered on expanding and improving AB InBev’s reputation and ESG strategy. This includes a special focus on responsible drinking, social impact, community affairs, social norms marketing, brands with purpose, entrepreneurship with various groups within the value chain, and partnerships across six zones in collaboration with ABI’s sustainability and commercial functions. 

These include AB InBev’s largest partnership, which is with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). Together, the two organizations have been improving road safety globally since 2018. As part of this work, she led the partnership’s renewal and expanded its scope beyond Road Safety to cover Entrepreneurship, Smart Drinking, and Water management as well.

Her work on these topics goes beyond the company’s partnerships. Garcia consolidated the entrepreneurship retailer programs and established a Community of Practice to enable cross-functional cooperation between AB InBev teams globally. She also led the AB InBev Foundation in integrating its work into the company’s ESG strategy, which led the IDB to approve a $900,000 grant for the company’s entrepreneurship programs in the Middle Americas, among other projects. 

Garcia also performed a similar function in AB InBev’s Marketing Academy’s Smart Drinking and Social Norms Marketing (SNM) program, where she was responsible for setting the company’s Global Smart Drinking Goals in motion. There, she successfully convinced each market to support Smart Drinking by launching the biggest competition of its kind, the “Smart Drinking SNM Campaign” contest, now in its fourth year. She also leads partnerships with the company’s commercial functions around the topics of responsible consumption, entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, and road safety.

Passionate for excellence and impact-driven results, her work at AB InBev has been recognized externally by academics at Georgetown University, Harvard University, and the United Nations.

In 2022, she was selected as one of the Hispanic Rising Stars by We are All Human. Previously, Garcia was selected as one of the 100 international “Leaders of the Next Generation” as a member of the Stars not-for-profit organization. She co-authored the “How business can drive inclusive growth and development” report published by Harvard Kennedy School, runs a blog on ESG, and was a 2017 U.S. Top Women in PR Award winner. Garcia has been a member of several global boards, such as IBM Women’s Diversity Network Group, Inversor Impact Investing Fund, the Regional Latin America Center of the private sector to support the UN SDGs (CR/SP), and Microverse. She currently serves as a board member for the Social Marketing Association of North America (SMANA), Latimpacto,  and Business for Impact at Georgetown University. Most recently, she served as a guest lecturer for Georgetown University’s McDough School of Business’ MBA program. 

Due to her expertise in brands with purpose and shared value, Garcia has been cited in several books on the subject, including “Brands on a Mission” by Myriam Sidibe and “From Me to We” by Ricardo Ernst and Jerry Haar.  Thanks to her work, Garcia also received an honorific invitation to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center forum to draft a statement on post-pandemic recovery actions to present to the G20. Of the 20 global social impact leaders from major foundations, southern hemisphere governments, multilateral organizations, and the private sector, she was the only private company representative there.

Over the years, Garcia has also had the opportunity to be a keynote speaker and panelist at many different forums. These include the Symposium on Inclusive Growth at Harvard University, Women’s International Forum, World Social Marketing Conference, Latimpacto, South African Road Safety Conference, Georgetown University, International Road Federation Conference, and British Colombian Chamber of Commerce, among many others.

In prior roles, she has managed sustainability programs and led work on communications and public relations in Latin America, aligning external and internal communications and ensuring a sense of community across the region.