CID SPEAKER SERIES: Democratizing PDIA knowledge one development practitioner at a time: experience from the online course

Date: 

Friday, March 23, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Perkins Room - R-429 4th floor, Rubenstein Building. Harvard Kennedy School

Speaker: Salimah Samji, Director, Building State Capability Program - Harvard University.

About the talk: Salimah will share the learnings from teaching the PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation) Methodology to hundreds of practitioners worldwide through the Program's online course. She will describe the "real world" challenges of applying this methodology and share success stories of practitioners worldwide.

Salimah SamjiAbout the Speaker: Salimah Samji is the Director of the Building State Capability (BSC) Program. She has over fifteen years of experience working in international development, on issues of public service delivery, transparency and accountability, strategic planning, and monitoring and evaluation. She joined CID in 2012 to help create the BSC program and is responsible for strategic planning and oversight. Salimah also leads the PDIA online courses.

Prior to joining CID, she was an independent consultant working for the World Bank on issues of governance, and the Hewlett Foundation on strategic planning for one of their grantees. She has worked as a senior program manager at Google.org, leading a transparency and accountability initiative focused on empowering citizens and decision makers, by making information on service delivery outcomes, publicly available. Salimah has also worked at the World Bank as a social/rural development and monitoring and evaluation specialist in South Asia.

She has a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo (Canada) and a Masters in Public Administration in International Development (MPAID) from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a qualified Casualty Actuary who decided to change careers after her 18-month experience working in Afghan refugee camps with a Canadian NGO (FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance) based in Pakistan. Salimah has worked and lived in Kenya, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Canada and the USA.