Marie-Claude Martin
Program ManagerDr. Marie-Claude Martin is the Program Leader for the Think Tank Initiative. Dr. Martin first joined IDRC in 1994 as a Program Officer and progressed to Team Leader for two Programs: the Micro Impacts of Macroeconomic and Adjustment Policies (MIMAP) and Vietnam Economic and Environmental Management (VEEM). An economist by background, she left IDRC in 1999 to obtain a Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of Montreal. Her professional experience includes research at Université Laval and Université of Montreal and consultancy work with several international organizations. Before returning to IDRC in 2006, she was senior researcher at the Canadian Population Health Initiative at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). Her areas of research include poverty analysis, inequality and human development.
Peter Taylor
Senior Program Specialist
Peter Taylor is a Senior Program Specialist for the Think Tank Initiative. Before joining IDRC, Peter was the Leader of the Participation, Power and Social Change Team, at the Institute of Development Studies where he spent the last 6 years. Prior to that, he worked as a technical advisor for the Swiss development cooperation NGO Helvetas, and as a lecturer at the AERDD at the University of Reading, UK. Peter has a background and doctorate in agricultural education. He has worked, published and taught on the theory and practice of capacity development in international contexts, the role of education systems and institutions in participatory and social change. He has particular interests in organisational learning and change, and programme evaluation. He has worked in many countries of the world, especially in East and Southern Africa and Central, South and South East Asia.
Kaveri Gill
Senior Program Officer
Kaveri Gill is a Senior Program Officer for the Think Tank Initiative based in Delhi, India. Before joining IDRC, Kaveri worked on the UNICEF child poverty study and on the assessment of social inclusion in service delivery in India. Prior to that she led the evaluation study of the National Rural Health Mission at the Planning Commission and contributed to the evaluation of other national flagship social protection schemes. Kaveri obtained her PhD in Economics from Cambridge. She has worked and published on poverty and deprivation, social exclusion and pro-poor policies. She has recently produced the book “Of Poverty And Plastic: Scavenging and Scrap Trading Entrepreneurs in India’s Urban Informal Economy” where she uses an interdisciplinary approach to poverty analysis in the Indian plastic recycling industry to look at how poverty, development, and the environment interact in urban India.
John Okidi
Senior Program Officer
Dr. John Okidi is a Senior Program Officer for the Think Tank Initiative based at IDRC’s Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa (Nairobi). He obtained a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1997. John comes to IDRC from a Research Fellow position at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), working with IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program. Prior to joining IFPRI in May 2007 he served a six-year period as the Executive Director of the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) in Uganda. Before joining the EPRC in 1999 as a Senior Research Fellow, he was a consultant for one year at the Development Research Group of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. John has extensive experience in microeconomic policy analysis, especially with application to panel and time series of cross-sectional survey data. Accordingly, he has written and published in the areas of economic growth and the distributional and poverty impacts of macroeconomic policies.
Paul Okwi
Senior Program Officer
Paul Okwi is a Senior Program Officer for the Think Tank Initiative based at IDRC’s Regional Office for Eastern and Southern Africa (Nairobi). Prior to joining IDRC, Paul worked for the World Bank in Kampala, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi and was a lecturer at Makerere University. Paul has a PhD in Economics from the University of Cape Town, and an MA in Economic Policy and Planning from Makerere University. He has published extensively on welfare and income inequality, poverty mappings, geographic determinants of poverty, and natural resource economics.
Senior Program Officer
Dr. Diakalia Sanogo is a Senior Program Officer for the Think Tank Initiative based at IDRC’s Regional Office for West and Central Africa (Dakar). He obtained a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University in the USA in 2001. Diakalia returns to IDRC after spending two years (May 2006 – July 2008) in the position of Impact Economist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria. From September 2004 to March 2006, he served as Program Officer of the Secretariat for Institutional Support for Economic Research in Africa (SISERA) in Dakar. He has extensive experience in designing, implementing and evaluating agricultural research and development projects on a regional scale in Central and West Africa. He has a strong interest for research and development activities related to agricultural development, agricultural products market innovations and the development of competitive agro-industries, poverty analysis and microfinance.
Samar Verma is a Senior Program Officer for the Think Tank Initiative, based at IDRC’s Regional Office for South Asia in New Delhi. Samar obtained a PhD in Economics from Magadh University, Bihar, India. He comes from Oxfam GB, where he first joined as Trade Policy Advisor in March 2003. He progressed to South Asia Regional Policy Advisor in 2005 before finally moving on to lead their global economic justice policy group in March 2006 as Team Leader based at Oxford, UK. He is also the founding Executive Director of Centre for Trade and Development (Centad), a Delhi-based regional think tank. For two years prior to joining Oxfam GB, he worked as Senior Fellow with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) in New Delhi, and published widely on international trade and competitiveness, particularly related to textiles. He began his professional career in the corporate sector in 1996, working as Economist and Project Manager with cotton textile conglomerate Arvind Mills in India. He has written and published in the areas of trade and competitiveness.