Other News
15 Sep 2014
Dr Juha Uitto takes office as the newly appointed Director of the GEF IEO
Juha I. Uitto started as Director of the GEF Independent Evaluation Office in September 2014. He came to the position from being the Deputy Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the United Nations Development Programme since 2009. Prior to that, he worked as Evaluation Adviser in UNDP and as Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator/Specialist with the GEF.
Over the past decade and a half, he has conducted and managed a large number of programmatic and thematic evaluations of international cooperation at the global, regional and country levels, in particular related to environmental management and poverty-environment linkages. Dr. Uitto spent the 1990s with the United Nations University coordinating the university's environment and sustainable development research and training programs. His earlier work included positions in the Nordic Africa Institute, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and as consultant in development cooperation. He has had visiting positions in the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University in Japan; Division for Global Affairs, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey; and the International Studies Program of the University of Montana, Missoula.
He was educated at the Universities of Helsinki and Lund, and holds a PhD in Social and Economic Geography. He has authored/edited several books and published more than 30 peer reviewed articles and book chapters on topics related to the environment, natural resources management, environmental hazards, and evaluation. His book Evaluating Environment in International Development was published by Routledge-Earthscan in May 2014. In October 2012, the European Evaluation Society awarded him for a "distinguished contribution to evaluation practice.”
