Esther Rouleau
Senior Associate
Based in Montreal, Canada.
Fluent in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Intermediate Arabic
Esther is a Senior Evaluation Consultant with over 12 years of experience in international development. She has successfully completed over 30 consultancy assignments for UN agencies, funds and programmes (UNICEF, FAO, UNAIDS, UNHCR, UN Women, WFP, WHO), international financial institutions (ADB, AfDB, IaDB, World Bank), global funds (GCF), bilateral donors (AusAID, Global Affairs Canada), NGOs (Nutrition International, Rights and Resources Initiative, CARE), foundations (C&A Foundation, One Drop) and research institutions (IDRC, ACIAR). She has conducted a wide-range of programme, policy and strategic evaluations, as well as organizational assessments and development effectiveness reviews. Esther has experience analyzing large qualitative and quantitative datasets, and has collected data through global surveys, interviews and focus groups. She has facilitated several multi-stakeholder workshops and webinars to validate and disseminate evaluation findings and recommendations.
Esther has strong evaluation expertise in a wide range of thematic areas, including child protection, health, nutrition, WASH, and HIV / AIDS. She recently explored social protection issues when evaluating a UNICEF strategy to provide psycho-affective support to children and adolescents affected by the migration crisis in Honduras and when she led the assessment of a UNICEF programme to prevent armed violence in LAC. She also conducted several programme evaluations in the area of nutrition and food security, evaluating IDRC’s Canadian International Food Security Research Fund (CIFSRF) and its Cultivate Africa’s Future Fund (CultiAF), as well as Nutrition International’s technical assistance program. Additionally, she conducted organizational assessments and policy evaluations of UN agencies such as the FAO and WFP. In terms of WASH, she successfully completed evaluations of the Water Partnership Programme and Water.org, and is currently conducting a Midterm Evaluation for One Drop. As regards the health sector, Esther is working jointly with WHO’s Evaluation Office conducting country programme evaluations in countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Senegal. She also worked with UNAIDS reviewing their agenda for women and girls and supporting them to better address linkages between SDG 5 and health targets related to HIV. Esther also conducted a number of humanitarian evaluations (namely with UNHCR, WFP and UNICEF), and has a sound understanding of OECD-DAC criteria used in the conduct of such evaluations.
Esther has strong knowledge of results-based management, UNEG evaluation principles and methodologies. She has extensive experience in providing quality assurance services to a variety of clients, including reviewing the quality of evaluation products such as terms of reference, inception reports and evaluation reports. In 2018, she worked with ImpactReady LLP as a Senior Technical Reviewer for UNICEF’s Global Evaluation Reporting Oversight System (GEROS). In 2014-2015, she provided similar services to UNICEF’s Office of Evaluation when working at Universalia Management Group. In 2018, she also reviewed the quality of evaluation products of the AfDB’s Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV) and produced a meta-analysis that highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of AfDB-commissioned evaluations. Additionally, she reviewed the quality of evaluations commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IaDB) using a standard methodology developed by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Network on Development Evaluation (DAC-EVALNET), and conducted a meta-analysis of those that passed the quality test to assess the organization’s development effectiveness.
Prior to working as a monitoring and evaluation consultant, Esther worked as a human rights researcher for Guatemala’s Presidential Coordinating Commission on Human Rights (COPREDEH) and for the International Bureau for Children’s Rights (IBRC), and therefore has solid knowledge of human rights-based approaches to programming (HRBAP).
Esther has working experience in more than 25 countries globally.