Margo Berends

Margo Berends focuses on the evaluation of international development projects, particularly education and workforce development programs in francophone Africa. She has over eight years of experience in international development program implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and research.

Since joining Mathematica in 2019, Berends has supported seven mixed methods evaluations. She is currently working on the evaluation of two Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) projects in Morocco—performance and outcomes evaluations of the Workforce Development Activity and a randomized controlled trial evaluation of the Secondary Education Activity. She also supports impact and performance evaluations of MCC’s Secondary Education Activity in Côte d’Ivoire and MCC’s Irrigation and Market Access Project in Niger. Across all of these projects Berends contributes to the evaluation design, designs survey instruments and qualitative protocols, works with local partners to manage data collection, oversees data cleaning and analysis, and interprets findings. Berends was previously a member of the monitoring, evaluation, and learning team for the Gates Foundation’s Partnership for Inclusive Agricultural Transformation in Africa (PIATA) and supported the final impact evaluation of an MCC maternal and child health project focused on child stunting in Indonesia.

Berends holds a master’s degree in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and bachelor’s degrees in economics and political science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She previously worked at Global Communities and served as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.