Agenda

Véronique Salze-Lozac’h is Deputy Director General in the Independent Evaluation Department at the Asian Development Bank. She is an economist, with a strong political science background, and has worked for both the public and the private sector on foreign direct investments, inclusive growth, private sector development, and policy reforms in Africa and Asia. Prior to joining the ADB, Ms. Salze-Lozac’h was Senior Director of Economic Development and Chief Economist at The Asia Foundation, where she oversaw strategic planning for the Foundation’s economic activities and developed programs across 18 Asian countries in areas of policy reform, enabling business environments, regional cooperation, and trade and women entrepreneurship. In this role, she supported Asian initiatives to accelerate inclusive and sustainable economic growth and broaden economic opportunities.

Xianbin Yao is the Special Senior Advisor to the President of the Asian Development Bank. He coordinates ADB’s development effectiveness work; and engages ADB’s Board Committee on development effectiveness, and the Independent Evaluation Department. Prior to this, Mr. Yao was the Director General for ADB’s Pacific Department, as well as Regional and Sustainable Development Department. Mr. Yao, a national of the People’s Republic of China, joined ADB in 1991.

Hon. Olfa Soukri Cherif is a member of the Parliament – Tunisia. She is a Steering Committee member of the Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation (GPFE) which is the global movement of parliamentarians promoting evaluation culture. She is instrumental in promoting evaluation in the country in collaboration with the evaluation community. As one of the Vice-Chairs of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & IMF, Hon. Soukri Cherif chairs its Middle-East and North African regional chapter. She is a member of the French National Council for Development and International Solidarity (CNDSI) as a foreign political leader.

Before taking on her parliamentary duties, she was an lecturer in Economics at the University of Tunis El Manar, and an assistant in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she also studied. Hon. Soukri Cherif graduated with an executive MBA in Trade Policy from Harvard University Governance School.

Emmanuel (Manny) Jimenez is Executive Director of the International Initiative on Impact Evaluation (3ie), a non-profit organization which provides grants for the rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of development projects and programs and supports the use of such evidence in decision-making. He came to 3ie early in 2015 after many years at the World Bank Group where he provided technical expertise and strategic leadership in a number of research and operational positions including as director of the bank’s operational program in human development in its Asia regions from 2000-2012 and as director of public sector evaluations from 2012- 2014. Before joining the bank, Dr Jimenez was on the economics faculty at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from Brown University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Development Effectiveness.

Merwin Salazar is the Executive Director of the Senate Economic Planning Office (SEPO) in the Philippines, a post he holds since 2010. Prior to joining the Senate of the Philippines in 2004, he worked as a project consultant at the World Bank Office Manila for the Public Expenditure, Procurement and Financial Management Review (PPFMR) and Decentralization Study projects. His advocacies include the passage of a national evaluation policy in the Philippines that would expand the establishment of monitoring and evaluation units from the national to the local government units. Recently, he obtained a certificate from the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET), a self-initiated effort to capacitate himself for the job. He also spearheaded the conduct of an on-going training on evaluation for the legislative staff of the Senate of the Philippines. He has more than twenty years of professional experience from both private and public sectors in the areas of economic research, financial management, and public policy. He obtained both his Bachelor of Science in Business Economics and Master in Development Economics from the School of Economics of the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

Gambhir Bhatta is Advisor in the Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila, and Chief of the Bank’s Knowledge Advisory Services Center. He is also currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (Singapore) after having had an Adjunct Professor appointment there during 2016-2018. His other concurrent appointments have been at ADB Institute (NonResident Adjunct Fellow, 2016-2018) and National College of Public Administration and Governance, University of the Philippines, Manila (Adjunct Professor, 2018-2019). At ADB, he has led various missions to design development projects and programs in Asia, and has contributed directly to a portfolio of more than two billion dollars in programming in the broad areas of governance and public management, including public financial management, anticorruption, SOE reforms, and local governance. Prior to joining ADB in 2005, he was Senior Advisor in the New Zealand public service. He has almost 30 years of experience in governance and public sector management in advisory, policy planning, and program development and management realms across 4 continents.

Alexander Wellsteed is a Principal Evaluation Specialist in the Independent Evaluation Department (IED) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) where his work focuses on the evaluation of the bank’s private sector perations. Prior to ADB Mr. Wellsteed was an Independent Consultant at Alternative Asset Investment Advisors in Tokyo supporting institutional investors with the due diligence of overseas private equity funds. Mr. Wellsteed also held roles as an Associate Director General at Japan Bank for International Corporation (JBIC) and as Investment Director at Greenpark Capital LLC in Hong Kong. Prior to relocating to Asia in 2012, Mr. Wellsteed served as a Senior Investment Officer in the Financial Markets and Private Equity Funds Department at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Washington DC where he served as Transaction Lead for equity and
tructured finance deals with banking, insurance and reinsurance clients in Asia and Africa. Mr. Wellsteed started his career in finance at the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Ltd., in Japan, where he was responsible for overseas investments and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the energy, telecommunications, and transportation sectors. Mr. Wellsteed is a national of the United Kingdom, has studied variously at universities in the England, Germany and Japan and holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University.

Farzana Ahmed is the Lead Evaluation Specialist at the Independent Evaluation Department (IED) of the Asian Development Bank. Amongst other evaluation roles, Ms. Ahmed leads the evaluation capacity development function at IED. Ms. Ahmed joined the ADB in 1998 and prior to joining IED, held positions in ADB Operations that included a country posting in Indonesia and a secondment as an Advisor to the Australian Agency for International Development. Before joining ADB, Ms. Ahmed worked in various financial positions in the private sector in the United Kingdom and Australia. Bangladeshi by origin, Ms. Ahmed graduated from Oxford University, UK and is a qualified chartered accountant.

M. Teresa Kho is the Deputy Director General of the East Asia Department covering operations in the People’s Republic of China and Mongolia. Prior to this, she was ADB’s Country Director in India (2013–2016) and Country Director in Bangladesh (2012–2013). Ms. Kho was Director of South Asia Urban Development and Water (2010–2011) and Director of the Office of Cofinancing Operations (2008–2010). Ms. Kho joined ADB in 1997 and worked in various departments, including Budget, Personnel and Management Systems Department, Office of the Vice-President Finance and Administration, South Asia Department, and Private Sector Operations Department. Before joining ADB, Ms. Kho spent 12 years in the U.S. private sector, performing finance, treasury, and audit functions for Fortune 500 companies. A U.S. national, Ms. Kho obtained an MBA from Stanford University, California, U.S.A. in 1991 and B.A. Economics from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, U.S.A. in 1983.

Maurya is a senior evaluation officer in the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), with 20+ years as an evaluator.  Maurya’s current IEG work involves methods advisory and evaluation capacity development (ECD) support for CLEAR (Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results) and IPDET (International Program for Development Evaluation Training). She was team leader of an M&E training program in the World Bank Institute and has trained government professionals in Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America on M&E and needs assessment topics.  She holds graduate degrees in international affairs/economics and education, both from George Washington University.  Maurya is active in the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and was co-chair of AEA's Needs Assessment Thematic Interests Group.  She is a co-author of the 2012 book, A Guide to Assessing Needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results.

He has worked as an evaluator in the international environment and development arena for the past two decades holding positions in the GEF and UNDP, including as Evaluation Advisor and Deputy Director in the UNDP Independent Evaluation Office. In these capacities, he has managed and conducted numerous evaluations at the country, regional and global levels. His earlier career combined positions in international organizations, academia and as consultant. For most of the 1990s, he was environment and sustainable development research and training program manager at the United Nations University. A geographer by training, he holds a master’s degree from Helsinki University in his native Finland and earned his PhD from the University of Lund. Juha Uitto has published widely on the environment, natural resources management, hazards, and evaluation.