Evan Borkum

Evan Borkum has more than a decade of experience leading large evaluations of international development programs, with a particular focus on the workforce development, agriculture, and social protection sectors. He specializes in conducting rigorous, mixed-methods evaluations to provide actionable insights about program impacts and causal pathways. He has worked on programs in East Asia, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe and Central Asia.

Borkum has extensive experience in in the workforce development sector. Currently, he serves as principal investigator for an mixed-methods evaluation of investments by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in Morocco that are seeking to better align vocational training courses with the skills demanded by employers. He has also served as principal investigator for mixed-methods evaluations of earlier large MCC-funded investments in workforce development in Georgia and Namibia. Borkum also recently led an outcomes evaluation of Generation, a program that seeks to improve employment outcomes for disconnected youth through a seven-component methodology that includes intensive workforce training boot camps, in India and Kenya.

Borkum also has strong sectoral experience in the agriculture sector. He is principal investigator for the mixed-methods evaluations of two agricultural markets projects in the state of Odisha, India, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that seek to better integrate poor small-scale producers into formal markets through farmer producer organizations. For MCC, he was the principal investigator for the 10-year evaluation of investments in high-value agriculture in Moldova, which included creating local water user associations and rehabilitating irrigation systems, as well as an evaluation of a project in Morocco that sought to increase income among fruit tree producers through irrigation, training, and post-harvest infrastructure investments.

In the social protection sector, Borkum is leading the evaluation of the world’s first Development Impact Bond for refugees, in Jordan. The impact bond provides multi-year funding for a microenterprise training and grants program aimed at improving the ability of refugees and vulnerable host community members to meet their basic needs. In the health and nutrition sector, he has provided technical leadership for two randomized controlled trials of innovative interventions to support frontline health workers in the state of Bihar, India and a large-scale randomized controlled trial of a child stunting intervention in Indonesia. The findings from these studies have been published in peer reviewed journals. Borkum also plays a role supporting projects across Mathematica’s Global Unit by providing technical advice and quality assurance services to project teams.

Borkum holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.