The Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) has appointed Dr. Douglas Glandon as Program Manager, effective August 2026. Glandon succeeds Dugan Fraser and assumed the role after serving as GEI’s Acting Program Manager since February 2026, following his role as GEI's Lead Technical Advisor.
As Program Manager, Glandon provides strategic, operational, financial, and programmatic leadership for GEI, a global partnership dedicated to strengthening national monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems and advancing the use of evidence in decision-making. He takes on the role having led the development and implementation of GEI's strategy for 2026–2030 (GEI 2.0).
Glandon brings two decades of experience working with governments and institutions to build the systems through which evidence gets produced and put to use. Before joining the World Bank, he was Chief of Strategic Initiatives at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), where he advanced the organization's methods development, establishing and leading groups that bring data science and artificial intelligence (AI) into evaluation practice. He organized 3ie's training services into a coherent program, with common pedagogical standards, a shared curriculum library, and a dedicated business line. He also launched 3ie’s Evidence for Policy and Learning unit, a third pillar alongside impact evaluation and evidence synthesis, which starts from the decisions governments and institutional partners face and works with them to choose methods that fit.
Earlier, as embedded Advisor for Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning in Fiji's Ministry of Health and Medical Services, he worked with the Permanent Secretary and senior Ministry leadership to build an M&E system integrated with how the Ministry plans and makes decisions. That work included developing the national health strategic plan and cascading it, for the first time, through operational, unit, and individual work plans, with performance indicators tied to explicit theories of change and reporting aligned at each level; strengthening the quality and decision-use of the Ministry's information systems nationally, divisionally, and sub-divisionally; and establishing a formal cadre of M&E specialists embedded across all reporting units of the Ministry, sustained after his departure through a newly created budget line. The Prime Minister's Office subsequently shared the approach as a model for other ministries. That combination of embedded government work and system design runs through his career; Glandon has worked directly with government counterparts in more than 15 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Glandon holds a PhD in health systems from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Master of Public Health from Tufts University. He has published more than twenty peer-reviewed articles and chapters on evaluation methods and health systems.
"Six months ago, when Doug took on the role of acting program manager, he rapidly assumed an impressive workload across a broad range of issues," said Dr. Jozef Vaessen, Head of GEI and Chief Evaluation Officer at the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank. "GEI 2.0 sets a clear direction for the partnership. Doug led its development and has been driving its implementation since, and he has earned the confidence of our partners and donors along the way. I have high confidence in his leadership of the program." Vaessen retains overall strategic oversight of GEI and will continue to serve as its senior representative with partners and donors.
"I'm honored to take on this role working alongside excellent colleagues across the GEI network, and I'm enthusiastic about where GEI is headed," said Glandon. "That direction starts from a fairly simple proposition: strengthening a country's monitoring and evaluation system is, at its core, institutional reform. It is political, intermittent, and it rarely moves in a straight line. Our partners have worked this way for years – the CLEAR centers building relationships of trust with government counterparts across political cycles, IPDET and ENAP raising the skills and standards of the profession more broadly. What the new strategy does is build around that reality, with a theory of change, planning approach, and measurement model that match how institutional change actually happens, rather than the linear progression that planning and reporting frameworks traditionally assume. In practice, that means engagements designed over several years instead of annual cycles, with diagnostics, advisory support, and training built into a single package. And it means measuring ourselves against whether those systems are actually stronger and still working after our support ends. That includes being disciplined about testing what part we played, alongside everything else that shapes reform."
Under GEI 2.0, Glandon will lead work across two strategic pathways. The first is strengthening national and subnational M&E systems, delivered through GEI's CLEAR network of regional centers. The second is advancing the practice of the M&E field – through BetterEvaluation, Glocal Evaluation Week, and the training programs of IPDET and ENAP, including PIFED and TAQYEEM. The two pathways are mutually reinforcing: country engagements draw on regional and global expertise as they go, and what partners learn working inside government systems shapes the standards, guidance, and training the network provides as public goods to the evaluation community.
