Khaled Ibrahim, DPPE 2022
Graduate Diploma in Public Policy and Program Evaluation (DPPE) graduate Khaled Ibrahim has been working as a program manager for various international peacebuilding programs in post-conflict countries which all share the objective to improving community resilience and reintegrating tens of thousands of peoples affected by armed violence.
“Looking back, I now believe that before joining the DPPE my knowledge on evaluation was truly basic,” says Ibrahim. “The program and the wealth of its knowledge took me to a journey of deep reflection on what it is that any intervention can do, why, for whom and to what extent, and by which lenses we could judge its merit and worth.”
I am really thrilled and proud to become one of the great DPPE alumni community. I will always be grateful for all what I have learned during this exciting program. My heart is filled with lot of gratitude to my professors, their teaching assistants, my cohort and particularly my evaluation case study team (Theresa and Brian) and lastly, all the great SPPA support team who guided me through the administrative support during the program.
In March 2022, Ibrahim returned to the field as coordinator of an internationally supported stabilization program in DRC with the United Nations. “While I was doing this type of work for many years, after the DPPE, I find myself more open to look into programmatic issues (proposals, processes, evaluation, etc.) with different eyes,” he says. “In fact, I felt that my questions (and not necessarily my answers) are becoming more nuanced and provocative.
“Those questions, indeed, help triggering good discussions among my team. We start to reflect together on how to reach the right questions that would help us formulating a theory of change or to plan an outcome, process, impact evaluation. Evaluation studies at DPPE made me more humble vis-à-vis the programs that I am supposed to manage, mainly by helping me embracing their complexities and engaging closely with many stakeholders to reach a common understanding of both the problem that need to be addressed and the context that would determine its success as well as the criteria by which the progress of the program could be assessed.”