Speaker bio: Alessandra Garbero

The Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) 2022 conference:  
Strengthening evidence use during the pandemic and beyond

Tuesday 22 – Friday 25 March

Register here: cedil2022.eventbrite.co.uk

Speaker biography: Alessandra Garbero

Alessandra Garbero, Lead Regional Economist at the Near East, North Africa and Europe Division (NEN), IFAD

Alessandra Garbero is Lead Regional Economist at the Near East, North Africa and Europe Division (NEN) at IFAD. She is specialized in econometrics and demography, with more than 15 years of professional experience in the field of international development, applied research, statistics, and evaluation. Alessandra’s specific areas of interest are research methods, micro-econometric estimation, forecasting, impact evaluation of development policies, data science, and specifically, artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning.  She joined IFAD in November 2012, and she has been leading, managing and has provided strategic guidance for credible high quality evaluation evidence and development effectiveness research. She devised a methodology that allows the Fund to measure its corporate impacts. She initiated and operationalized the IFAD9 Impact Assessment Agenda, an ambitious research strategy aimed at measuring IFAD’s impact in the rural poverty domain. Most recently, she has been leading the “Athena” Innovation Challenge project, which leverages artificial intelligence and big data for the Fund, to accelerate knowledge generation on strategic themes and data-driven decision making for better project design and more impactful operations.