TRAINERS

Thania de la Garza
Mexico
M&E Consultant

Thania holds a master’s degree in Public Policy and a bachelor’s in Economics by the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). With 20 years of experience, Thania is a specialist in policy evaluation and social development issues. Along with her career, she has built professional relationships with key political and social actors to enhance the use of evidence in public policy. With extensive experience in the Mexican public administration, Thania is committed to the improvement of social development policy and the strengthening of an evaluation culture, as well as with transparency and accountability in public spending. From 2009 to 2020,, Thania served as Head of the Evaluation Unit in the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), where she coordinated successful evaluation strategies for more than 2,500 public policies and programs with a social rights perspective, such as the Evaluation Reports of the Social Development Policy for the years 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, as well as Comprehensive Performance Evaluations of Federal Programs. Thania has focused on generating different research and communication strategies to bring evaluation and social policy together. Under her direction, CONEVAL has published thematic evaluations by social rights, policy handbooks about what works to tackle different social issues, policy systematic reviews, evidence translation tools and executive summaries for decision-makers (infographics, storytelling cards for parliamentary consultation, monitoring and evaluation fact sheets by social program), among others. These dissemination strategies have assisted policy-making decisions and budgetary considerations at the federal level in Mexico. Thania has given lectures in top public and private universities from Mexico and abroad. Thania has also participated as a speaker in numerous conferences and seminars oriented mostly to issues related to public policy evaluation.