About the Author

 

Royce Escolar is an international development practitioner with over eleven years of experience managing, designing, and evaluating programs that seek to improve the lives of people in South East Asia.  He is currently based in Bangkok, Thailand providing practical and sustainable solutions to Monitoring & Evaluation and project design issues that determine whether development policies and projects actually deliver on its intended positive change.

 

In 2013, Royce obtained a Master of Evaluation degree from the University of Melbourne with particular focus on participatory approaches to evaluation, evaluation capacity development, and theory of change processes. He also has a Master of Arts degree in Economics (2002) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa as an East-West Center/Asian Development Bank - Japan Scholarship Program Degree Fellow.  He has, for a long time (and to keep his sanity), abandoned economics in favor of program evaluation.  Time will tell if he made a crazy choice.

 

Royce spent most of his international development career as a Senior Regional Program Manager with the former Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID).  Most recently, he spent a year and a half from March 2016 to August 2017 as the full-time Monitoring & Evaluation and Communications Officer at the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Area (AANZFTA) Support Unit based at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia. During this time, he conducted a number of case studies to evaluate the impact of training. He also contributed significantly in the design of the new AANZFTA website, while producing a number of communication products that underscored how M&E data could best be visualized and thereafter used by policy makers.

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In his previous job incarnations, he worked as an Economic Researcher, a Program Manager in a policy think tank, and even as a Money Market Trader.

 

Royce is most passionate about film, working out, food and travel. He strives for simplicity and balance in life and tries to adopt this very same approach to program Monitoring & Evaluation - i.e. keeping it useful, simple, and accessible to all relevant stakeholders.