Alison Evans

About Alison

Alison Evans is the former Director-General and Vice President for Evaluation at the World Bank Group. In this role she led the work of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) in assessing the effectiveness and impact of lending, non-lending, investment and guarantee operations across public and private sectors in all geographies in which the World Bank Group operates. During her tenure, IEG was a founding partner of the Global Evaluation Initiative, a global partnership for supporting monitoring and evaluation capacity building in underserved regions of the world.

Prior to the World Bank, Evans was Chief Commissioner of the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICIA) which scrutinises the quality and impact of UK aid spending across all spending departments and reports to the International Development Select Committee of the UK Parliament.

Before taking a leading role in these critical scrutiny functions, Evans was Executive Director of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the UK’s leading global development and humanitarian think tank, during which time she was responsible for significant organizational growth and impact across all aspects of ODI’s work. Prior to ODI, Evans was heavily involved in policy, research and advisory work on aid and development effectiveness, working closely with bilateral and multilateral partners on issues ranging from poverty reduction to public financial management, monitoring and evaluation and assessing aid impact. She spent a six-year stint as a staff economist at the World Bank in the mid 1990s.

Evans has a PhD in development economics from the University of Sussex and an MPhil in the Economics and Politics of Development from the University of Cambridge. She has served as a NED for a number of mission-oriented organisations from Social Finance UK to BBC Media Action, the Baring Foundation and Oxford Policy Management.