Louise has worked as a monitoring, evaluation and learning professional for the past 10 years, in which time she has worked for both Oxfam America and Action Aid International and as an independent evaluator. 

 Her work involves all stages in the MEL cycle, from the strategic design of MEL frameworks and approaches, creating MEL processes and products, supporting monitoring and reporting to managing evaluations and facilitating spaces for reflection and learning. She has strong facilitation skills with particular interest in Theory of Change as a tool to build shared ownership of project outcomes and to challenge assumptions about how change happens to support learning and improvement.  She also has considerable experience in managing project evaluations, having commissioned numerous evaluations for INGOs as well as designing and implementing fieldwork as an independent consultant.

Before specialising in MEL, Louise worked on Knowledge Management and research communications within the agricultural development sector.  During her PhD, she developed an innovative approach to use social network mapping to visualise information flows related to agricultural value chains in rural municipalities of Bolivia.  This led to work exploring the dynamics of supply and demand of knowledge within agricultural innovation systems in order to improve communication of technical information.

Louise has lived and worked in Bolivia and Peru and she has evaluated projects in Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, Mexico, Tanzania, Nigeria, Rwanda and Cambodia on subjects as diverse as agricultural innovation, women’s rights, indigenous rights, extractive industries, microfinance and tax justice.