Ghulam Muhammad Shah

I protect the pulse of the planet by ensuring that for every dollar we spend, we make a valuable contribution towards improved wellbeing of HKH communities in a healthy mountain environment. I help to ensure our effectiveness, efficiency and impact by linking science and policy for mountain development supported by innovation and robust evidence.

What I enjoy each day at ICIMOD is the multicultural learning environment and working with highly capable colleagues from diverse disciplines. At the same time, every bit of evidence showing our contribution to the lives of the people of the HKH region, its environment, and habitat further strengthens my motivation and curiosity to join hands with inspirational and highly talented colleagues, and contribute my part.

I love what I believe evaluations do for us at ICIMOD: make good programmes great and make our work in the HKH more innovative, more responsive to community needs, more gender-sensitive and more effective. I’m passionate about designing evidence-driven decision support systems and complexity-informed programmes in transboundary settings. I love leveraging mixed-method designs in evaluations and conducting impact evaluations in experimental and non-experimental settings. I enjoy working with evaluation stakeholders, leveraging technology in evaluations, and promoting innovations for portfolio-level strategies and results. I also enjoy fishing and meditating in the wilderness of the mountains, especially in my beautiful home, Gilgit-Baltistan.

I am a statistician and a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) expert, with a specialized mix of expertise in programme designing, and designing and managing results-based M&E systems, establishing robust evaluation designs, managing and conducting impact assessments, and conducting institutional and programmatic-level evaluations in complex settings. I’ve developed these specialized skills and expertise over 19 years of work in the development sector focused on poverty reduction, resilience building, climate change, adaptation and migration, and education and development in multiple countries mainly in South Asia. I have published my experiences in multiple refereed journals and I hold M.Sc. degrees in statistics, and monitoring and evaluation.