Global mental health experts recognize that traumatic stress can dramatically affect progress toward the same outcomes Chemonics projects work toward each day, including educational achievement, economic productivity, social cohesion, positive communal relations, and overall health and wellbeing. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of these sources of trauma, whether it be armed conflict, natural…
Zoltan Milic is an experienced economist with over 17 years of experience in monitoring and evaluation, data and complex systems modeling and analyses, change management, and internal auditing. Zoltan is currently the director of Monitoring and Evaluation, for Chemonics’ US Government Business Line. In his prior role, he served as the monitoring and impact evaluation…
While most development projects use some form of remote management — U.S.-based home offices oversee project offices, main offices in capitals oversee satellite offices, and teams are distributed across multiple countries (e.g., FEWS NET) — the COVID-19 pandemic presents uncharted territories for many in the global development sector. Travel and movement restrictions, work from home…
The full implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be determined, but it has disrupted nearly every aspect of socioeconomic activity at a breadth and scale not seen in modern memory. Now activities that once seemed routine — school, work, travel, errands, and social gatherings —present serious health risks, and the resulting lockdown is…
Ana de Paiva is the director of operational excellence of Connexi, a Chemonics company. She has spent the last nine years working with USAID’s global health supply chains. She was first exposed to supply chain management a decade ago during her graduate program in international development at the American University in Washington, D.C., and has…
Abdulkader Alaeddin is a team leader overseeing the Syria Education Programme and a monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) expert with 14 years of experience designing, implementing, and leading activities in conflict-affected areas across the Middle East, including in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. He has experience designing and implementing grants programs, including in the…
Harun Birlik is an experienced development professional with more than 10 years of experience working in the Middle East and North Africa region. Harun specializes in grant management, corporate and donor compliance, and internal audit. As a grant and compliance lead of Chemonics’ United Kingdom Division, he provides leadership in areas relating to financial management,…
This blog post has been adapted from an article in Journal of Social Science & Medicine – Population Health. If you’ve worked in development for long enough, at some point you’ve scratched your head about why a technically sound strategy achieved less than expected results. As the old business adage goes, “Culture eats strategy for…
While efforts to improve inclusion of learners with disabilities are gaining traction with donors and ministries of education, those efforts largely focus on identification and disability mapping to get policy into place. Approaching inclusive education solely from the lens of policy development leaves the classroom teacher and the children she serves waiting. Practical implementation of…
“Failure is strength. The most effective and innovative organizations are those that are willing to speak openly about their failures because the only truly ‘bad’ failure is one that’s repeated.” —Engineers without Borders, USAID Learning Lab No one wants to fail. And fewer wish to own up to it. Understanding the causes of failure is…
Understanding cultural norms is essential to achieving results in development interventions and preventing interventions from causing unintended negative consequences. However, capturing norms within everyday contexts in ways that can be monitored and evaluated can be expensive and time consuming and is not always feasible. We tested a novel method, the cultural consensus analysis (CCA), in…
Despite a global commitment, the U.N. estimates that countries and donors need $2.5 trillion in additional finance each year to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, official development assistance in 2018 was $153 billion. The number speaks for itself: the development community simply cannot…