Ian Goldman
CLEAR Anglophone Africa

Ian has worked for 40 years on issues of rural development, decentralization, sustainable livelihoods approaches, community-driven development, and evidence-based policy-making and implementation, applying the disciplines of planning, evaluation, research and action-learning. He has worked in 20 countries in Africa, Europe and Latin-America; with national, provincial and local government; and in the NGO and SME sectors. From 2011 to June 2018 he was Head of Evaluation and Research in South Africa’s Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME), where he led the establishment of South Africa’s national evaluation system, and in 2017 became Deputy Director General for the new Evaluation, Evidence and Knowledge Systems Branch.

In 2015 Ian was the founding Chair of the Management Committee of the Twende Mbele African M&E Partnership, with partners Uganda, Benin, South Africa, CLEAR AA and African Development Bank, and as been a Commissioner of the Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) since 2012.

Ian left DPME in July 2018 to join the Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEAR Anglophone Africa) based at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, advising internationally on evaluation and evidence, teaching and writing, and is leading a research project leading to a book on evidence-based policy in Africa. In addition Ian is an Adjunct Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town, Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the UK and Honorary Research Associate at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council.