Sara Vaca
Senior Associate
Based in France. Originally from Madrid, Spain.
With a strong academic and theoretical base, (M.A. in Evaluation, 2013 and M.A. in Non-Profits Management, 2005) Sara Vaca has been providing results based management support for 18 years. She has extensive experience supporting programmes led by both UN organisations (UNICEF, UNFPA, UN Women, WFP) and NGOs (Red Cross Movement, World Vision, International Medical Corps, Plan, among others) in areas related to gender equity, child protection, health, HIV/AIDS, economic security, human rights, and humanitarian programming. Over the years, Ms. Vaca has conducted, often as lead, more than 20 evaluations over multiple continents (countries worked in include: Albania, Burkina Faso, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinee, Indonesia, Iraq, Malawi, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, South Sudan, Switzerland, Togo, Tunisia, and Ukraine) in areas ranging from women’s empowerment to cash transfers to disaster responses. She has evaluated programmes and scaling-up interventions in diverse sectors such as sexual and reproductive health, economic security, gender equity, women empowerment, gender-based violence and peace building. She has a deep knowledge of UNICEF’s country programmes and areas, as she led the development of the 25 Theories of Change embedded in the UNICEF Indonesia CPD.
Sara has been supporting the UNICEF Global Evaluation Reports Oversight System (GEROS) since 2015 and was part of the Impact Ready LLD UNICEF GEROS technical review team from 2015 – 2018. She was the GEROS Technical Review Team Coordinator in 2016 and has GEROS assessed over 50 UNICEF final evaluation reports in English, French, and Spanish. She also assured the quality of UN Women evaluation reports and worked for UNICEF’s LACRO as internal evaluation advisor creating a QA system and providing internal quality for ToRs, Inception reports and Draft reports. Sara has strong meta-evaluation experience and has assessed over 120 reports.
Ms. Vaca brings top-notch Data Visualization expertise, specialized in conveying evaluation-related concepts using visual elements. She posts regularly new ideas about how to better understand and communicate evaluation visually (www.saravaca.com/dataviz/). Sara is fluent in English, French, and Spanish with an intermediate command of written Portuguese. She has lived in Spain, Malawi, Burkina Faso, France, Switzerland and Taiwan.