Rima Al-Azar

Rima Al-Azar is a senior evaluation professional with over 27 years of experience in international development and humanitarian action. She has more than 20 years leading and contributing to complex, strategic-level evaluations for the UN system, the European Union, multilateral financial institutions and bilateral donors. Rima has served as Team Leader or Senior Evaluator in over 20 mixed-method evaluations for organizations including the UN Secretariat, UNDP, WFP, FAO, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNHCR, IFAD, the World Bank, the EU, Sida and DANIDA. Her experience covers country, regional, thematic and strategic evaluations with a strong focus on UN system coordination, governance, resilience, migration, gender equality and the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus. She brings deep background in a diverse range of evaluation methodologies as well as institutional knowledge of the UN development, humanitarian and peace-security pillars, field experience in over 70 countries, and extensive experience presenting strategic findings to senior decision-makers and facilitating inter-agency consultations. 

Rima work spans multiple sectors, including migration, health, education, social protection, governance, gender and social inclusion, agricultural, rural development, livelihoods and food security. Previously, she has held senior staff positions at the World Bank, UN agencies (FAO, UNICEF and UNDP) and International NGOs (Transparency International and the Red Cross). In addition, she has dialogued with senior officials in the public sector (at the central and centralized levels), private sector (banks and MSMEs), and NGOs/civil society. 

Rima holds a Master’s degree in International Public Policy from Johns Hopkins University; a Master’s degree in International Development and Economics from Georgetown University; and a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from Rutgers University. She is fluent in English, French and Arabic and has working knowledge of Spanish.