Xavier Legrain
Director, USC Development Portfolio Managment Group
Tarra Kohli
Operations Director, USC Development Portfolio Managment Group
Advisors
DPMG benefits from the collaboration of several former World Bank members who serve as advisors.Christine Wallich
Christine Wallich has over 30 years experience in the development field, including more than 20 years’ experience in senior leadership positions in international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Most recently, she served as the Director for Methods and Quality, and Chief Evaluator of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, where she developed and pioneered the use of evaluation standards for independent evaluations to enhance their quality, relevance and rigor. She also led an international task force to develop an evaluation policy intended to establish the principles governing independent evaluation in the Bank. As an evaluator, she managed both thematic and project-specific evaluations, including of the World Bank Group’s private sector operations and guarantees.
Prior to this, she managed several high-profile country programs: as Country Director for Bangladesh, she managed the World Bank’s second-largest concessional assistance program. She was the Bank’s first Director in post-conflict Bosnia and led the design and implementation of Bosnia’s reconstruction program aimed at delivering a quick peace dividend, with projects in education, health, transport, energy, water, micro-finance and social protection. More recently, her work on conflict-affected countries has focused on designing projects to be conflict-resilient; project implementation bottlenecks in fragile states, and developing conflict-sensitive country strategies.
At the Asian Development Bank, as Director of the Infrastructure, Energy and Finance Department, she managed a $2.5 billion lending program of public sector infrastructure projects spanning South, East and Central Asia in transport, energy and telecoms; she was concurrently responsible for the ADB’s private sector arm, and managed ADB’s portfolio of private sector investments and private equity funds.
Ms. Wallich has a PhD and MA in Economics from Yale University and Cambridge University, respectively, and is also a Certified Financial Analyst (CFA).
Sue Berryman
Sue Berryman is a Senior Advisor to the Development Portfolio Management Group (DPMG). In her 35 year career, Sue E. Berryman taught at the Harvard Business School, worked for 12 years as a Behavioral Sciences policy analyst with the RAND Corporation, and directed the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University. She has subsequently had 20 years of experience in economic development, primarily as a World Bank staff member and, post-retirement, as a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and USAID.
Her technical expertise lies in education systems, especially their financing, governance, management, and accountability and their alignment with a country’s skill demands in the public and private sectors. At the World Bank she conducted numerous public expenditure reviews of education systems in emerging economies, analyzed the performance of education systems of developing countries, and designed and supervised lending with Governments. She managed and was the primary author of the World Bank’s first lending strategy for education in Europe and Central Asia.
Under the auspices of the Bank’s Quality Assurance Group (QAG), for 14 years she assessed the performance of the World Bank’s active lending portfolios and analytic activities, including the initial pilots to assess the validity and reliability of the instruments developed for these assessments. In this context she evaluated hundreds of World Bank projects in terms of their likelihood of achieving their development objectives. She assessed the quality of the governance and anti-corruption aspects of projects in all sectors for the World Bank’s Governance and Anti-Corruption Board, chaired assessment teams to evaluate programs in the World Bank’s Global Programs and Partnerships, conducted assessments of the education projects in country-specific portfolios, and was a member of small panels to assess the World Bank’s Education Sector Board and the World Bank Institute. She managed the midterm review of the capacity building programs in Timor-Leste for the World Bank, New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Australian Aid. She has also conducted several ex post facto assessments for the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). She has a Ph.D. from John Hopkins University with interdisciplinary studies in political economy, social psychology and sociology.
Willy De Geyndt
Willy De Geyndt’s career in the health sector includes working with middle and low income countries to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their health services delivery. At the World Bank he was a Lead Public Health Specialist for 15 years. He designed, assisted in the implementation of, and evaluated health, nutrition, and population projects in more than 60 countries covering Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Health projects emphasized, inter alia, health sector reform, hospital autonomy, HIV/AIDS, decentralizing health systems, developing management training courses, non-communicable diseases and public/private partnerships. He also has a combined six years of management experience managing a private consultancy firm and a private non-profit community hospital in Mexico City.
Professor De Geyndt’s current and former academic work includes being the Professor of International Health at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington D.C. Prior to this position, he was a Professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health, Washington, D.C. and a professor at the University of Minnesota, School of Public Health and School of Management for 18 years. He consulted for WHO and USAID in resource constrained countries. His research focused on measuring the quality of care provided by health professionals and healthcare institutions and on evaluating the quality of research projects funded by the federal government.
Consultancy contracts with the World Bank and DPMG include: (a) assessing and improving the design and implementation of health projects at the design stage and mid-course; (b) designing and evaluating HIV/AIDS projects in the Caribbean and Africa regions, and (c) restructuring problem projects to improve their likelihood to meet their objectives mainly in francophone Africa.
This combination of academic work and field experience has resulted in numerous publications in books, monographs and peer-reviewed journals. Dr. De Geyndt obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and the School of Management. He was a Fulbright scholar at New York State University from his native Belgium.
Linda G. Morra Imas
Linda Morra Imas has over 30 years of experience in managing evaluations nationally and internationally and in developed, developing, and transition countries. Until her recent retirement, she was Chief Evaluation Officer and Evaluation Capacity Building Adviser for the World Bank Group and earlier, a former director at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. She is founder and co-director of IPDET, the International Program for Development Evaluation Training.
She now consults on monitoring and evaluation and provides M&E training to various organizations, including non-profit organizations, evaluation firms, national ministries, and bilateral aid organizations. Among her many publications is the textbook The Road to Results: Designing and Conducting Effective Development Evaluations published by the World Bank and thus far reprinted in 5 languages. Dr. Morra Imas is also co-author of Case Study Evaluations, a World Bank publication. Her workshop on Designing and Conducting Case Studies is held annually at IPDET and as a pre-conference workshop at many evaluation venues.
She recieved her Ed.D. in Evaluation from the University of Virginia.
Patrick Grasso
Patrick Grasso’s professional career has been spent primarily in the field of evaluation, including conducting evaluations, managing evaluation functions, building and maintaining evaluation partnerships, and training in evaluation methods. This work has been carried out in a number of institutional contexts, including the World Bank and other major development organizations, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Pew Charitable Trusts, and universities. He has served as a member of the American Evaluation Association’s Task Force on Evaluation Policy, including his role as Chair for the past two years.
At the World Bank, he was responsible for leading efforts of the Operations Evaluation Department (now the Independent Evaluation Group, or IEG) to overhaul its ex-post project evaluation approach, by successfully leading a team of evaluation staff in developing a new instrument for conducting project reviews. This involved the re-definition of key ratings criteria and indicators, with a sharper focus on project outcomes, as opposed to inputs and outcomes. In the mid-2000s, he participated in a Bank-wide task force that further revamped and modernized the whole ex-post project evaluation system. In that capacity, he played a key role in identifying and resolving problems in the rating system and data used to assess project accomplishments. In related work, he carried out an evaluation of the Bank’s annual project monitoring system self-report to the Board of Executive Directors on the performance of the Bank’s project portfolio. The evaluation highlighted both strengths and weaknesses in this key report, and made recommendations on improving the Bank’s monitoring system. During his time at the World Bank, he also established a Knowledge Management program for the Evaluation Department, and recruited staff to carry it out. It was cited as one of the most successful KM efforts at the Bank, and the function remains in use more than a decade later.
In addition to consulting for the World Bank, his recent work includes developing evaluation policies for the Caribbean Development Bank and assessing evaluation use for Norad. Mr. Grasso has a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin.
Basil Kavalsky
During his 35 years as a World Bank staff member, Mr. Kavalsky covered many regions of the world and thematic areas. Entering the Bank as a Young Professional, he started as a country economist and subsequently became Assistant Director of the Bank’s Development Economics Department where he organized a new Country Policy function establishing links between economists doing research and practitioners at the country level. In 1987 he became Director of the Resource Mobilization Department where he led the staff teams that negotiated a capital increase for the Bank, two IDA replenishments and the initial establishment of the Global Environment Facility. His regional experience included South Asia, the Middle East and most notably Eastern Europe; he was Country Director from 1993-1997 for Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia and the Baltic States, and from 1997-2000 for Poland and the Baltic States, based in Warsaw.
Since retiring, he has worked at the Independent Evaluation Group and the Quality Assurance Group at the World Bank. He was the Task Team Leader for three major evaluations carried out by the Bank for Turkey, Indonesia and Nigeria. In addition to his role in coordinating these evaluations and preparing the final report, he contributed chapters on the macro-economy, fiscal developments, and governance and anti-corruption. He also piloted a new methodology for IEG in evaluating analytic and advisory activities (AAA). He has worked on thematic evaluations on the topics of the Poverty Reduction Support Process (carrying out case studies in Albania and Cambodia, and preparing an overview on the capacity building); Poverty Reduction Support Credits (preparing a case study on Ghana); Youth Employment (preparing case studies on Liberia, Ghana and South Africa); and the Bank’s Role in Middle Income Countries (for which he prepared the section on the Bank’s knowledge services).
In 2007, he began consulting for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) where he headed consultant teams evaluating IFAD’s programs in India and Vietnam, and also its support for Private Sector Development. His current work for IFAD is as head of the consultant team on the evaluation of IFAD’s policy for Direct Supervision and Implementation Support. As part of this evaluation he is developing the methodology for the evaluation, reviewing the efforts of other IFIs in this area, undertaking a field-based country case study, and preparing the draft report. In 2012 he provided support to the Evaluation Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) reviewing their instruments and knowledge services. Mr. Kavalsky has a Master of Science in economics from the London School of Economics.
Andrew Bennett
Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author, together with Alexander L. George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005; winner of the Giovanni Sartori Award for the Best Book Published in 2005 on qualitative research methods), and co-editor, with Jeffrey Checkel, of Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (forthcoming in 2014, Cambridge University Press).
Professor Bennett is the co-founder, together with Colin Elman and David Collier, of the Institute for Qualitative and Multimethod Research, which teaches research methods to 200 PhD students each June at Syracuse University. He was the first president of the American Political Science Association section on Qualitative Methods, and he has taught case study methods to graduate students in Norway, Switzerland, Chile, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Italy, and Argentina as well as the United States. He has served as a consultant on case study research projects for the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Professor Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Ira W. Lieberman
Ira W. Lieberman, Ph.D., brings extensive experience in economic development and microfinance to his current position of President and Chief Executive Officer of LIPAM International, Inc. In this capacity he advises governments, not-for-profit institutions and private companies in emerging market countries.
Dr. Lieberman held several positions at the World Bank in Washington D.C. from 1985-1987 and 1993-2004. He was responsible for oversight of all private and financial sector work in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and Turkey. He managed private and financial sector operations in Russia, Central Asia and ex-Yugoslavia, and served as Acting Director of the Global Small Business Department for the World Bank Group (IFC and IBRD). Dr. Lieberman created and managed a Small Business Department, which supported World Bank Group activity for small and medium enterprises globally. As a senior manager of Privatization and Restructuring in the Private Sector Development Department, heco-managed privatization globally with an emphasis on transition economies in Easter and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.
He also served as Chief Executive Officer of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest ("CGAP"). In this position, Dr. Lieberman created and managed an international secretariat for 26 bilateral and multilateral donors to support the development and sustainability of microfinance institutions throughout the developing world. He managed a grant facility to support capacity building in some 50 microfinance institutions globally.
Dr. Lieberman took leave from the Bank for a year to work with George Soros, serving as his Senior Economic Advisor and as an advisor to the Open Society Institute (OSI—the Soros Foundation) assisting the foundation in revamping its microfinance and small business program. He also served on the board of Directors for OSI’s fund for SMEs and microfinance.
Prior to the World Bank, he worked for 20 years in the private sector with senior management responsibility for ten years with an international trading and manufacturing company, ICC Industries, Inc., in the chemicals, fine chemicals and non-ferrous metals industry. Presently Dr. Lieberman serves on the board of several not-for-profit institutions focused on microfinance and social (impact) investing.
Dr. Lieberman has published extensively on three principal topics—privatization and restructuring, financial crisis and workouts/ resolution strategies, and microfinance. Dr. Lieberman has an MBA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. (D.Phil.) from Oxford University.
John Nellis
John Nellis is a Senior Advisor to the Development Portfolio Management Group (DPMG) at USC. Over a long career, with the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and several universities and think-tanks in the United States, Canada, Tunisia and Kenya, he has conceived, implemented, managed and evaluated socio-economic development operations in over fifty countries in Africa (including North Africa), Asia, Latin America, and the formerly socialist states in Europe and Central Asia. He specialized in the fields of public sector management, public enterprise reform, the privatization of public enterprises, and private sector development. A large part of his work has centered on measures to enhance the impact and quality of development projects and programs in these areas.
After leaving the World Bank, and prior to joining the DPMG, he consulted for various regional and thematic units of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the British Department for International Development, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, the Asian Development Bank, Transparency International, the Egyptian Centre for Economic Studies, the Government of Bolivia, the Government of Serbia, the Government of Tanzania, the International Law Institute, and the Center for Global Development.
Recent assignments include assessing the quality of the proposed privatization program of the Government of Kuwait; reviewing and advising on a program to restructure and then sell or liquidate a set of loss-making public firms in Serbia; and assessing the quality and impact of the World Bank Group’s efforts to assist the private sector in Afghanistan over the period 2002-2011. Nellis is the author of more than 60 books and articles on various aspects of development (most recent: “The International Experience with Privatization: Its Rapid Rise, Partial Fall and Uncertain Future,” School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, 2012). He holds a Ph.D. degree in Political Economy from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in New York.
Miguel Schloss
Miguel Schloss has more than 35 years of experience in economic development issues and has held leadership positions in multilateral agencies, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations. He headed the Corporate and Planning Division at the World Bank, where he led the creation of a three-year $4.5 billion reform program redirecting the bank's human resources, finances, policies, and programs to address emerging development issues. He also ran technical divisions in telecommunications and mining (worldwide) and industry and energy (in Africa), as well as country programs (in Latin America).
He was executive director of Transparency International during the formative (1998-2002) years of the institution and spearheaded its rapid expansion and positioning on governance and anti-corruption issues worldwide. Since then, he has become managing partner of DamConsult Ltd, an investment and management consulting firm providing support to private enterprises in strategic and business planning. He is currently serving on several corporate and NGO boards, including: President of Surinvest Ltda. and Board member of its subsidiaries and joint ventures (Chile); Trustee, Global Legal Information Network (GLIN); Expert Advisory Board Member of Dalberg Global Development Advisors; Advisory Board Member of Caspian Sea Revenue and International Private Water Association (IPWA); Associate Member of Oil, Gas & Energy Law (OGEL-UK), and Executive Committee member of Transparency International in Spain and Chile.
He also advises at present major corporations, governments and civil society organizations in their institutional, organizational and policy issues, as well as governance, risk assessments and mitigation arrangements, ad project appraisals.
Mr. Schloss holds an MBA from Columbia University and degrees in commercial engineering and economics from Catholic University in Chile, and EDPs in Harvard and Stanford.