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Ana Acosta

IDEAS MEL Director

Ana brings 9 years of experience in operations, research, data analysis, project management, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

Her experience in monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) includes designing and managing MEL systems and strategies for donors, conducting evaluations, performing advanced data analysis, and implementing capacity building activities. Specifically, Ana has worked with various USAID program teams across geographies and sectors on a range of open innovation programs to design, operationalize, and manage MEL strategies inclusive of results frameworks, indicators, evaluation plans, and learning agendas to generate evidence of the value that development programs are creating.

Her interests include demystifying data-driven decision making for social impact program teams, to ensure that programs are achieving their intended impact and helping the people they are meant to help. Ana draws heavily upon social science approaches, as well as traditional and cutting-edge evaluation approaches, to generate knowledge and evidence that guide development programming, fight global inequality, and hold aid projects to a higher standard.

Before joining Itad, Ana worked with MSI (a Tetra Tech company) as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Manager on the USAID Countering Transnational Corruption Grand Challenge for Development. Prior to that, she worked with Moonshot Global LLC as the Evidence, Learning, and Impact Senior Specialist, where she mainly supported USAID’s open innovation portfolios through the Catalyst project. Ana holds a Master of Arts in International Development and International Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a BA in Economics from Florida State University. She is bilingual in Spanish and English.