Zenda Ofir 

Zenda Ofir is a South African international evaluation specialist. With a PhD in chemistry, she initially worked as manager in a South African science council, responsible for national higher education/industry research on biotechnology, food production, and food security; later she worked as Director of Research at the University of Pretoria. Since then she has worked on assignments in nearly 40 countries on four continents—conducting evaluations, facilitating the design of monitoring and evaluation systems, and helping programs and organisations clarify their change logic towards impact. 

She has done extensive work in the agriculture sector for the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and AWARD, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded program cultivating African women leaders in agricultural research and development. 

She is a former President of the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) and former Vice-President of the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE). She also served on the first steering committee of the Network of Networks on Impact Evaluation (NONIE), a global network representing hundreds of donor organizations and professional evaluation networks, and she is the first Board member of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) to live outside of North America.

Zenda's Bounce Beyond Role

My role is to lead evaluation activities with the CoNECTs individually and for Bounce Beyond as a whole, with a focus on assessment for transformation.  I approach this with reference to leading approaches such as Blue Marble and with a MERL framework. MERL (occasionally also M&E or MEL)  is a widely used acronym for a Monitoring, Evaluation, Reflection (or Research) and Learning system. It emphasises evaluative practice as a more inclusive set of actions, and avoids the negative connotation of evaluation as top-down ‘policing’ for accountability.