Dr. Leona Ba is currently an associate professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to this role, she worked as an organizational development and evaluation consultant for more than 20 years, focusing on improving the performance and effectiveness of organizations, teams, and programs. Her work includes strategic planning, program design, evaluation, and the development of feedback mechanisms between evaluation and organizational processes to facilitate organizational learning and adaptation. She has worked mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti and North America designing and leading evaluations of programs of organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States State Department, United Nations agencies, the World Cocoa Foundation, Plan International, and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). She has evaluated programs intervening in various areas including agriculture, emergency response, education, health, microenterprise development and natural resource management. Her extensive experience as an evaluation practitioner in a wide variety of cultural contexts developed her ability to integrate cultural responsiveness and equity throughout her work.
Dr. Ba is an accomplished trainer in evaluation having taught evaluation courses for staff of organizations such as USAID, the Department of State, DAI, Vital Voices, and the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD). She has been teaching the Culture and Evaluation course at the Evaluators’ Institute since 2012.
Dr. Ba holds a Doctorate in Human Resource Development/ Organizational Development from the George Washington University, and a Master of Science in Agriculture from the University of Maryland. She is fluent in French.