Speakers Corner #41: Strengthening Evaluation of Poverty and Conflict/Fragility Interventions

Meredith Kruger is a Program Manager for Land O'Lakes International Development, dedicated to creating opportunities for farmers in the world’s most challenging environments. Whether as interim COP in Timor-Leste or as Start Up Manager in Sri Lanka, Ms. Kruger has proven skillful at managing multi-stakeholder relationships while ensuring that project goals and targets are achieved. In addition to program management, Ms. Kruger provides technical input for Land O’Lakes approaches to conflict and gender. As the Conflict Practice Area Manager, Ms. Kruger works to develop Land O'Lakes’ strategies for successful operations in current and post-conflict countries, focusing on addressing the critical aspects of women’s equitable participation in economic development through agriculture. Ms. Kruger has an M.A. in International Development from American University.

Diana Rutherford, Project Director at the IRIS Center, University of Maryland, specializes in research methods, monitoring and evaluation, and program management. She manages the Assessing the Impact of Innovation Grants in Financial Services project (http://www.fsassessment.umd.edu) and directs the STRIVE learning agenda to test the effects of economic strengthening projects on secondary and tertiary beneficiaries, and the Time Horizons project to create and pilot a tool to measure the alignment of time horizons across institutions responsible for a public service. She has worked with research teams in CEE & NIS, Africa and Asian countries, including M&E work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Peru and Kazakhstan. Her research includes Bosnian legal aid campaign and business’ enabling environment, Ugandan decentralization, pharmaceutical procurement in Bulgaria, and the effects of value chains on households and children.

Jenny Bussey Vaughan is a Program Officer with Mercy Corps’ conflict management team. She provides technical support to Mercy Corps conflict management programs and manages a research project dedicated to improving monitoring and evaluation of interventions that aim to reduce both poverty and conflict. She has over 9 years of experience in community development touching on a wide range of sectors, including food security, community-managed microfinance, water and sanitation, and HIV/AIDS. Before joining the conflict management team, Jenny spent a year and a half managing Mercy Corps’ field office in Bouar, Central African Republic. She has also worked with OCHA-Ethiopia on displacement and conflict issues, with PSI managing health programs in West and Central Africa, and with the Discrimination Research Center managing research programs. She got her start in international development with the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Jenny has a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in psychology and a Master’s in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where her studies were focused on the intersections between conflict and development.

Adina Saperstein is an economic development consultant with over ten years experience designing and implementing enterprise development, value chain development, and community development programs in emerging and conflict-affected economies. Her focus is on integrating value chain development principles into innovative industry development, trade linkages, and socially compliant public-private partnerships. She has designed, analyzed, and provided technical support on projects in a range of agricultural and manufacturing industries in fifteen countries. Most recently, Adina has been providing ongoing technical assistance focusing on expanding economic opportunities for women in Afghanistan and West Africa, by engaging them equitably in profitable industries and value chains. She holds a M.Sc. in Development Studies from the University of London, and speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French.

Peter is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and a Graduate Fellow at Columbia’s multidisciplinary Program on International Development and Globalization (IGERT). Peter holds an MPhil in Political Science from Columbia and an MPhil in Economics from Tilburg University. His dissertation research examines migration and public good underprovision in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to his dissertational research Peter is working on a study of a major community driven development program in Eastern Congo and on a project that tries to develop new measures of conflict events using cell phone technologies in South Kivu.