Governance

Board Members

Ruth Levine, IDinsight (Chair)

Ruth Levine, PhD, is Chief Executive Officer of IDinsight, a global advisory, data analytics, and research organization.  Dr Levine, a development economist and expert in international development, global health and education, was a policy fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University between 2019-2020. Between 2011-1019, she served as the director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development and Population programme.

Before joining the Hewlett Foundation, Dr Levine was a deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning at the US Agency for International Development. In that role, she led the development of the agency’s evaluation policy.

Previously, Dr Levine spent nearly a decade at the Center for Global Development, an international policy research institute in Washington, DC. There, she served as a senior fellow and vice president for programmes and operations.

Dr Levine is the author or co-author of several books and professional publications, including “When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives through Impact Evaluation,” which led to the creation of 3ie, and "Making Markets for Vaccines:  Ideas to Action," which led to the development of the first Advance Market Commitment.

Dr Levine holds a BS in biochemistry from Cornell University and a PhD in economic demography from Johns Hopkins University.

Carola Alvarez, Inter-American Development Bank (Deputy chair)

Carola Alvarez is an Argentinian national with 25 years of experience in international development. She is an expert on evaluation methods, poverty alleviation interventions and human resource development. She has also worked extensively on the design and evaluation of large conditional cash transfer programmes in the Latin American region and on Progresa in Mexico.

Carola is currently chief of the development effectiveness division at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led an institution-wide reform to increase the level of empirical evidence used to demonstrate results from the Bank’s work. The number of rigorous impact evaluations in Bank operations went from 5 per cent in 2008 to 40 per cent in 2012.  She has also had high-level managerial experience as general country manager for the Andean Region; and as a core member of the corporate team that negotiated the Bank’s Ninth Capital Increase of Resources; among other roles.

Doha Abdelhamid, International Evaluation Academy

Doha Abdelhamid is Counsellor to the Executive Board of the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc) and Vice President of the Development and Consumer Protection Society. She was a Board Member to the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS) and the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE). Doha is an independent international economist and development specialist who holds a PhD in Financial Economics. She graduated from and facilitated ECDs in IPDET, Carleton University, Canada.

With more than 30 years of international experience in consulting and academia, she has been a senior policy and international relations advisor to the ministers of finance (2000-04); economic planning, local development (2004-06); and public administration (Central Agency for Organization and Administration), cabinet of ministers (2007-10), as director of fiscal, economic and local development, and public administration portfolio reforms, in Egypt. She was the first Director of the national capacity building program in performance-based budgeting/monitoring and evaluation of the state administrative body in Egypt (2000-04). Additionally, she has been an Advisor to the Center of Parliamentary Research (2008-10), Vice President of the Consumer Protection and Development Society, founding Evaluation Function Head of the International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue, Austria (2014-15), and Advisor to the National Council for Women.

Doha has designed many evaluation networks, systems, and approaches. She is an acknowledged evaluation capacity builder, institutional innovator, international peer reviewer and editorial board member of acclaimed, refereed academic journals, including the African Evaluation Journal (AEJ). She has been a recipient of several awards in evaluation, economics and sustainable development governance.

Dzingai Mutumbuka, former Parliamentarian, Zimbabwe

Until December 2020, Dzingai Mutumbuka served as a member of the Governing Board for UNESCO's Paris-based International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) as a representative of the African region. For ten years, he served as the Chair of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), a network that brings together all African education ministers and representatives of donors supporting the development of education in Africa.

Mutumbuka has held senior management positions in the education sector at the World Bank during 1990-2007. Prior to that, he held major political appointments in Zimbabwe, including as an elected member of the parliament. He became independent Zimbabwe’s first Minister of Education and Culture in 1980 and during his long tenure from 1980 to 1989, he developed one of the best systems of education in Africa.

He participated in the struggle for Zimbabwe’s Independence rising through the ranks to the leadership of ZANU-PF. Prior to joining the freedom struggle, he lectured in chemistry at the University of Dublin in Ireland and the University of Zambia in Lusaka. He has a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.

Currently, Mutumbuka sits on a large number of boards dealing with education, including Results for Development, Teach for All, Educate! Big Win Philanthropy, Vitol Foundation and the Advisory Council of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program whose main objective is to support newly-appointed Ministers of Finance and Planning, Education, Health, Youth, Gender from the global south so that they can become transformative leaders and help their countries to benefit from the demographic dividend. He is also chair of the RISE Advisory Board.

Elizabeth M King, Non-resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Elizabeth M King is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, she was acting vice-president for the human development network before retiring in September 2014. She was the World Bank’s director of education from 2008- 2014, during which time she was the technical head and senior spokesperson for global policy issues related to education. She also led the development of the Bank’s current education strategy and served as its senior representative in global partnerships on education. Other roles at the Bank included research manager for human development issues, lead economist for the human development department for East Asian countries, co-author of three World Development Reports and member of the Research Committee. 

Elizabeth is currently a co-editor of the Comparative Education Review, a frequent reviewer for economics journals, and member of the advisory boards of CAMFED, Teach for All and the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab. Before joining the World Bank, she taught economics at University of the Philippines, UCLA and Tulane University and lectured at the Graduate Program in International Policy Studies in Tokyo and the Université d'Auvergne. 

She has published articles in professional journals, books and book chapters and blogs on topics such as investments in human capital, gender issues and decentralisation reforms. She has worked in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Indonesia, Laos, Nicaragua, Pakistan and the Philippines, among others. She completed her BA and MA from the University of the Philippines, and holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University.

Henrik Urdal, Director and Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo

Henrik Urdal (PhD Political Science) is Director and Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Peace Research and a former Research Fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School.

Urdal’s work on political demography focuses on the impact of population and environmental change on armed conflict, and has been published in leading international academic journals. Urdal was part of a PRIO team producing a key background paper for the World Bank/UNDP landmark report Pathways for Peace. He has worked extensively on global trends in armed conflict as a former Director for the Conflict Trends project, a long-term collaborative effort between PRIO and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Oumoul Ba Tall, National Evaluation Association, Mauritania

Oumoul Ba Tall is the Secretary General of Mauritania’s national evaluation association (Association Mauritanienne de suivi-evaluation), which she helped establish. She was formerly President of the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation. Oumoul has 19 years of professional experience, including in the fields of auditing, accounting, evaluation, organizational, microenterprise, microfinance, and community-based development. She is active in a wider movement to build and strengthen evaluation systems worldwide. She is also the executive director of OKT-Consult, an audit and management consultancy business she started in 1997 in Nouakchott, Mauritania.

Sekhar Bonu, former Director General, Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office, NITI Aayog, New Delhi

Sekhar Bonu, PhD, is a senior fellow at NITI Aayog, the Government of India’s think tank in New Delhi. Previously (from April 2019 to June 2022), he worked as the Director General of the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office at NITI Aayog.

Prior to that, Dr Bonu worked at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Manila, Philippines, from 2004 to 2019. At ADB, he worked on health, urban infrastructure development and regional cooperation, mainly in the South Asia region.

Dr Bonu has worked in the Indian Administrative Services and served in Rajasthan between 1987-2003, as district magistrate, director of primary and secondary education, and chief executive officer of state-owned enterprises, among others.

Dr Bonu has a PhD in International Health from Johns Hopkins University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst charter holder. He did his Bachelor’s in Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) from Kurnool Medical College, India.
His research interests include state capacity building, improving service delivery, and using technologies for tracking results, among others, and he has published in peer-review journals.

Santiago Levy, Non-resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Santiago Levy is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution and Senior Advisor to the United Nations Development Program. Prior to this, he was president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association and spent a decade as the vice president for sectors and knowledge at the Inter-American Development Bank. He also served as the Deputy Minister at Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and Public Credit from 1994-2000 and was head of Mexico’s Social Security Institute between 2000 and 2005.

At the finance ministry, Santiago was the main architect of Progresa-Oportunidades, Mexico’s incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor; managed the transition from generalized to targeted subsidies; promoted legal reforms to decentralize resources to states and municipalities; participated in the change of the pay-as-you-go to the capitalized pension system; promoted a regional plan to develop Mexico’s southern region; and drafted and negotiated six budgets with the Federal Congress. At the Social Security Institute, he promoted legal changes to reform pensions and extend coverage to rural workers; was responsible for the provision of health services to 45 million people, introducing preventive health programs and electronic medical records; managed pensions for 2.5 million people and day-care centres for 230,000 children; managed $8 billion in reserves; and collected annually $20 billion in social security contributions. In 1993, he led the drafting of Mexico’s first anti-trust legislation, and then served as the first president of the Federal Competition Commission.

Santiago has received the following awards: First Place, National Research Prize in Economics, granted by Banco Nacional de México for his article, Poverty in Mexico; First Place, Latin American Economics Prize, granted by El Trimestre Económico for his article Multiple Exchange Rates and Foreign Exchange Rationing.

Santiago has published six books, several articles in academic journals and many book chapters on economic growth and productivity, social policy, informality, education, budgetary and tax policy, trade policy reform, rural and regional development, competition policy, labour markets, and policies for poverty alleviation. His latest book on economic growth in Mexico, Under-Rewarded Efforts, The Elusive Quest for Prosperity in Mexico was published in 2018 by the Inter-American Development Bank.

Susan Ketcham, former Chief Financial Officer, Hewlett Foundation

Susan Ketcham is a finance professional with experience in corporate planning and organizational development. She served as the Chief Financial Officer of the Hewlett Foundation, where she managed all corporate finance functions from 2001 through 2017. She helped the foundation as it grew in grants, effectiveness and evidence-based funding. Prior to that she served as the Chief Financial Officer at Skystream Networks, a privately-held technology firm.

She currently works as a consultant, focusing on the business management of non-profit and philanthropic organizations. She is engaged in furthering the organizational and financial strength of civil society organizations, both through her work as a consultant and her board work. Throughout her career she has been active in community development, including work on policy and programs relating to homelessness and housing. She holds an MBA degree from the Wharton School.