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Uma Lele retired from the World Bank in 2005 as Senior Adviser in the Operations Evaluation Department (OED, now called the Independent Evaluation Group, IEG) of the World Bank, an arm that reports to the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors. She is leading a Global Team of Authors (Eugene Terry, Eduardo Trigo and Jules Pretty) preparing a paper on the changes needed in the Global System for Agricultural Research for Development, and implications for regional and CGIAR research priorities, to be discussed at the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), in Montpelier, France, March 28th and March 30, 2009. At the World Summit on Food Security, November 16th to 18th 2009, in Rome, she participated in the Roundtable on Implementation of the Reform of Global Governance of Food Security. At the American Evaluation Association (AEA), she organized a session on November 13, 2009, on Evaluation Challenges of Climate Change and Avoided Deforestation as a Complex Global Public Good. She was core team member of the Independent External Evaluation of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in 2006 and 2007 with responsibility for the evaluation of FAO’s work in the areas of food and agriculture, forestry, fisheries, statistics and emergency assistance among others.
She continues to work in the areas of Global and Regional Public Goods, and the Changing Aid Architecture. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117999581/home. In 2008 she completed Independent Evaluation of the Implementation of the World Bank’s 2002 Forest Strategy and Forest Related Global Programs related to Reduced Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) in the context of Climate Change. She is contributing to the World Bank’s Design of Regional Health Systems Strengthening and TB Support Project for the control of tuberculosis in Africa. She served as a peer reviewer for the Independent Review of the CGIAR in 2008. She participates in the Quality Assessment Reviews of the World Bank’s Global and Regional Partnerships. She recently joined the board of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. In September and October 2009, she served on Grand Jury in the U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C. Her philanthropic activities include launching of Uma Lele award for best contributed paper on Role of Gender in Development at the International Association of Agricultural Economics (IAAE) in Beijing, August 21st, 2009, and travel grants to women leaders for training in sexual and reproductive health in honor of Dr. Nafis Sadik. In 2008 she was elected outstanding alumnus by the College of Agriculture, Cornell University.Under her leadership at the World Bank, in April 2005, OED completed the first and the largest independent evaluation of 70 global programs in which the World Bank partners with a variety of international agencies, bilateral donors, NGOs and the private sector. The evaluation involved managing a large team of evaluators and consultations with 800 individuals in partnering agencies (see OCED DACNews). The programs span several sectors including the environment, health, infrastructure, finance, trade, science and technology, and conflict. They involved Bank management of trust funds of well over $3 billion and their annual expenditures now rival those of the Bank’s annual IDA commitments. The evaluation addressed strategic, programmatic and program-specific issues in organizing global collective action based on in-depth analysis of 26 global programs, including the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, the Global Environmental Facility and later the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria. The evaluation broke new ground methodologically in assessing global partnerships and was considered best practice in OED. The report’s recommendations have led to significant reforms in the strategy, organization and management of the Bank’s global program portfolio. The findings have been widely disseminated through a number of international conferences and meetings including in bilateral and UN agencies. Following this global evaluation, Uma Lele was invited by the joint Swedish and French International Taskforce on Global Public Goods to prepare a paper (with three ex-World Bank experts) on Global Health Initiatives and Health System Capacities of Developing Countries. In Madhya Pradesh , India In the environmental area, in 1999-2000, she led the independent, yet highly consultative, evaluation of the World Bank’s controversial 1991 forest policy, addressing issues of biodiversity, poverty, climate change, safeguards, and international trade among others. The evaluation resulted in the Bank reformulating its forest policy with renewed engagement in forest management. Considered the most complex evaluation at the time, OED management assessed the forest policy evaluation to have set new standards for the increasingly participatory and multisectoral OED evaluations. In 2000 she was invited by China’s International Council on Environment and Development (CCICED) to co-chair (with Professor Shen Gao Feng, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Science) a high-level taskforce to assess the impact of China’s forest policy. Taskforce members came from Australia, Canada and China among others). The taskforce findings were presented to then-Premier Zhu Rongi and have resulted in reforms in China’s forest strategy and its implementation. Two sets of independent impact evaluators, one in China and another in OED, have described it as one of the most influential evaluations.
Uma Lele has also served in various capacities in research and operational departments of the World Bank, working in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Brazil, China, Indonesia and India among others. Through leadership of complex multidisciplinary teams of research, operational, and policy staff, through resource mobilization from a wide variety of sources and through advice, publications, public speaking and multi-stakeholder consultations, she has made important contributions in the areas of aid effectiveness, agriculture and rural development, science and technology, forestry and environment, health, and global collective action.
The first woman to obtain a PhD from Cornell University’s Agricultural Economics Department, Ms. Lele served as Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida’s Food and Resource Economics Department from 1991 to 1995. She established the University’s Office of International Studies and Programs overseeing the university’s 16 colleges and served as its first Director. While at the University of Florida, she also helped establish President Carter’s Global Development Initiative of economic reforms in newly democratizing countries funded by the Carnegie Corporation, serving as its first director. Also while at Florida, jointly with Professor Ronnie Coffman, a biologist at Cornell University, Ms. Lele initiated and co-chaired the GREAN (Global Research on Environmental and Agricultural Nexus) Initiative, a coalition of scientists from US universities, CGIAR Centers, and developing countries’ agricultural research systems to foster long-term collaborative research, teaching, and technology transfer on a global scale.
Uma Lele has served on the boards and advisory committees of many organizations including the CGIAR system. She serves or has served on Cornell University President’s Advisory Council of Cornell Women, on the advisory board of China’s Center for Agricultural Policy (CCAP) and on the High Level Advisory Panel of the External Independent Evaluation of the Global Environmental Facility.
She is a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association, has written or edited 15 books or book-length publications including the Design of Rural Development: Lessons from Africa, Aid to African Agriculture: Lessons From Two Decades of Experience, Managing a Global Resource: Challenges of Forest Conservation and Development and well over 100 papers on development-related issues. She has tutored and mentored students and staff.
She has a son and twin grand children. She is an amateur gardener, skier, sailor, art collector and musician. |
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