Rhonda Irby

vp, bd

Rhonda Irby serves as the Vice President of Business Development and is responsible for providing strategic direction and overall management for programs and capture efforts across all defense sectors. Rhonda’s successful track record spans across US DOD, Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa with a specialization in frontier markets.

Over the last decade, Rhonda has developed and won major contracts with defense and peace keeping agencies including UN, NATO, US Government, foreign militaries, law enforcement agencies and private security groups. She has lived on remote military bases when needed and traveled to places few could pronounce in the name of sales and customer service. She has also worked closely with international development agencies such as World Bank, UN, US DoD and USAID on economic development and advisory projects for war stricken regions. Her extensive network of contacts in the private and public sectors includes cabinet-level government officials, senior corporate executives and other political figures.

She considers one of her greatest achievements to be her development work in Afghanistan. Her focus was to help support the stabilization process that was a major focus of both General Petraeus and General McCrystal. Rhonda supported the facilitation of collaboration across government agencies and the private sector for the development of Afghanistan’s mining and energy sectors. She led and developed consortiums of international companies for Afghanistan’s first ever Hydrocarbon bid rounds. She was influential in negotiating up to the President level for the rights to develop Afghanistan’s first Independent Power Plant including arranging of finance with development banks and partnerships with international power producers.

Rhonda earned her Bachelors Degree in the Geosciences from California State University, Chico and has done graduate work there as well. She holds an Associates Degree in Japanese from UC, Irvine. Rhonda also sits on the board of the organizing committee of the Middle East Process Engineering Conference and is a member of the American Business Council in Dubai.

MDS