Jyotsna Puri

Jyotsna Puri or Jo is currently the Head of the Independent Evaluation Office of the Green Climate Fund. Previously, she was the Deputy Executive Director and Head of Evaluation at the International Initiative of Impact Evaluation (3ie). Dr. Puri is also adjunct associate professor at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University, New York where she teaches impact evaluation in practice.

Jo has more than 23 years of experience in policy research and development evaluation and has worked in several organizations including the World Bank, Columbia University and the UN. Her dissertation related work was instrumental in identifying biases that creep into policy evaluation and specifically in environmental policy. She was also amongst the first researchers to examine the question of measuring the poverty impacts of rural road building. In other research she has demonstrated and advocated for applications of economic theory and modelling with disaggregated data and measuring heterogeneous impacts. She has undertaken and led evaluation related work for UNDP, UNICEF, GEF and the MacArthur Foundation. She has examined and advised on evidence based climate change and environmental policy, advocacy for policy and behaviour change, community based engagements for improving vaccine coverage, methods for rigorously evaluating effectiveness of humanitarian action, behaviour change and climate change policies. Her research has focused on analyzing poverty impacts of policy and infrastructure investments in Asia and Latin America.