Valerie McDonnell-Lenoach (a dual British and Irish national) is a highly skilled evaluation professional with over 30 years of experience leading strategic evaluations within the international development field. Widely recognized for her methodological expertise and leadership in complex, multi-country assessments, she has overseen evaluation and learning for flagship donor programs funded by FCDO, the European Union, the UN system (WFP, UNOPS), and the World Bank.

Valerie’s core strength is her ability to design and deliver rigorous, theory-based evaluations that produce actionable evidence across diverse sectors, from climate resilience and marine ecosystems to humanitarian response, governance reform, and private sector development. She is a trusted Evaluation Team Leader with extensive expertise in formative and summative evaluations, contribution analysis, outcome harvesting, value-for-money assessments, and portfolio synthesis.

She has led evaluation designs and managed delivery for some of the most technically demanding assignments in the field, including the Blue Planet Fund’s OCPP and OCEAN initiatives, the Gender and Social Protection Programme (GSP), and WFP’s strategic plan evaluations in Zambia and South Sudan. As a core member of FCDO’s Evaluation Quality Assurance and Learning Service (EQuALS), she regularly supports evaluability assessments and theory of change development, providing guidance to programme teams in shaping evidence systems from the outset.

Beyond design and leadership, Valerie has worked as a senior quality assurance advisor on global projects, ensuring the follow-through of evaluation standards for performance, utility, credibility, and ethics. She is known for her precision, clear thinking, and skill in guiding multidisciplinary teams through politically sensitive and complex operational environments.

Valerie holds an M.Litt. in Economics from Trinity College Dublin and is trained in safeguarding, ethical research with human subjects, and PRINCE2 project management. She has completed assignments in more than 40 countries across Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the Caribbean.