Evan Borkum

Evan Borkum is one of Mathematica’s leading methodologists in the international research area and has more than a decade of experience conducting evaluations of development programs in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. He specializes in designing and overseeing rigorous, mixed-methods evaluations to provide the strongest possible evidence on program impacts and causal pathways.

Borkum has extensive experience in in the workforce development sector. Currently, he serves as principal investigator for evaluations of investments by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in Georgia and Morocco that are seeking to better align vocational training courses with the skills demanded by employers. He is also leading 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 other sectors. In the food and agriculture sector, he is the principal investigator for the evaluation of MCC’s investments in high-value agriculture in Moldova, which include creating local water user associations and rehabilitating irrigation systems. He is also principal investigator for the 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. 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.

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