About

Isabel Alvarez Murillo is the founder of Convergence Advisory, an independent strategic advisory firm specialising in water governance, climate adaptation, and institutional strengthening.

She works at the intersection of governance systems and development finance — helping multilateral institutions, bilateral donors, and governments understand why capital committed to water resilience so often fails to produce durable outcomes, and what institutional conditions are required to change that.

Her work is grounded in over a decade of field experience inside the institutions that design, regulate, and implement water and sanitation systems across Latin America and the Caribbean. She has worked directly with national regulators in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay  and understands from the inside how regulatory frameworks, tariff structures, and inter-institutional coordination either enable or block the translation of financing into services.

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Before founding Convergence Advisory, Isabel held senior roles at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), WaterAid Sverige, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNICEF, the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), and McGill University. She has worked across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America, and has contributed to programmes funded by Sida, Global Affairs Canada, the European Union, and major multilateral development banks.

 

Her first policy publication, The Absorption Gap: Why Institutional Readiness, Not Capital, Is the Binding Constraint on Water Finance in Latin America, argues that the LAC water resilience gap is an institutional absorption problem, not a capital mobilisation problem,  a direct challenge to the dominant framing in development finance. The paper introduces a five-dimension diagnostic framework for assessing institutional readiness prior to capital deployment.

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Isabel holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a Master of Science in Integrated Water Resources Management from McGill University, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP). She holds dual Ecuadorian-Canadian citizenship and is based in Montreal, Quebec.