Michelle Adams-Matson is MSI’s Senior Vice President for Programs. In this role, Michelle serves as a member of MSI’s leadership team and oversee its expanding monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) portfolio, as well as mission support, education, and leadership and organizational development (LOD). Michelle brings deep expertise on using monitoring and evaluation (M&E) to improve development impact and helps organizations integrate innovative techniques to improve learning. She believes the most effective M&E systems support an organization’s goals and are rooted in effective management structures. She sees M&E as a tool that can strengthen mutual learning with local organizations.

Michelle has served in MSI leadership roles for more than 20 years, most recently as its practice area leader for Strategy, Evaluation, and Analysis (SEA). SEA is MSI’s largest practice and includes 28 MEL projects in Washington, D.C. and across the globe. She also served as a technical director for USAID MEL platforms in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Pakistan (USAID’s largest MEL platform at the time). Michelle served as a senior collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) expert for USAID in South Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She led the design of a complex CLA platform designed to build resilience by collaborating with local communities and coordinating across implementing partners to layer, sequence and integrate interventions.

As a former senior program analyst for USAID, Michelle was responsible for country strategic planning and M&E for two regional bureaus. During that time, she chaired an Agency team to improve strategic planning systems and authored the first Agency-wide policies on strategic planning. Since then, she has designed, taught, and facilitated training courses and workshops on strategic planning, MEL and organizational development. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree in international development and U.S. foreign policy from American University in Washington, D.C.