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Caitlin is the Deputy Office Director and Team Lead for Evidence Use in USAID's Office of the Chief Economist. Caitlin was a founding member of the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Policy Team, developing their cost-effectiveness analysis methodology and launching several of the comparative cost-effectiveness analyses of education. While at J-PAL, she also developed a partnership with the government of the Dominican Republic and USAID’s Mission there to adapt a highly cost-effective program reducing school dropouts. This project was eventually awarded a DIV Stage 2 grant, and following successful evaluation results, has been scaled nationally by the government and replicated in other countries throughout Latin America. After that, she worked at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) for eight years where she established a team responsible for studying and improving the cost-effectiveness of IRC programs. In that role, Caitlin contributed to sectoral guidance and tools for cost analysis methods. She also helped IRC build up a set of hundreds of data points about the cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their programs. Using this data, her team provided direct support to country offices and large projects, ultimately identifying hundreds of millions of dollars in additional reach/impact through more efficient and cost-effective program design.

Caitlin joined OCE in July 2023, where she provides direct support to improve the cost-effectiveness of activity design (such as with USAID/Nepal) and serves as a technical reference for the OCE team on how to measure cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness in practice. She leads OCE’s Improved Activity Cost-Effectiveness (ImpAct) Reviews, where OCE works with teams in technical bureaus to jointly review the impact evaluation evidence on which interventions make more/less progress per dollar towards key development outcomes.