My first interaction with IDRC, from 1974 to 1976, was as the coordinator of the Colombian team for the Science and Technology Policy Instruments project that was initiated with Geoff Oldham, then of Sussex University. Next, in 1981, I was appointed Regional Director for IDRC’s Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Office (LACRO), which, at the that time, was in Bogotá, Colombia. I have fond memories of visiting many projects in the LACRO region with Ivan Head, then President of IDRC and a great leader, from whom I learned a lot..
The experience I gained from working with the Centre was fantastic and shaped the rest of my professional career. Besides the President´s Office, my main group of colleagues in Ottawa was the Office of Planning and Evaluation (OPE), with whom I worked in close collaboration. With Doug Daniels and the OPE team, we developed very interesting methodologies in the field of research planning and impact evaluation. In June of 1981, for example, we organized a major international workshop in Singapore on Resource Allocation to Agricultural Research. The workshop produced an excellent book that I still use today as a reference point.
The work we carried out in those years became the basis for many of the action-oriented research and development projects that I have carried out over the past 40 years. This work has focused on the monitoring and impact-evaluation of research and development policies and projects. Many development programs in the Global South concentrate on design, implementation, and policy formulation. As such, there is often little attention paid to monitoring and evaluating policy implementation, or to overall impact evaluation. I still use the methodologies we developed in those years, helping me to promote social learning processes.
1989 was one of the worst years in Colombian history, generating many operational problems for the Regional Office. As a result, during the 1989 spring general meeting in Ottawa, the decision was made to move the Regional Office from Bogotá to Montevideo, Uruguay. As Regional Director, I negotiated a Country Agreement with the Government of Uruguay for the functioning of the IDRC Office in Montevideo. By the end of the year, we had moved all the international staff to Montevideo, and had designed and initiated the new Regional Office. We were also able to hire and train a great team of local staff. I remained as Regional Director until my departure from IDRC in 1992.
After returning to Colombia at the end of 1992, I was able to apply many of the skills I had acquired during my time with the Centre. From 1992 to 1994, I was the first Executive Director of the Colombian Corporation of Agricultural Research (Corpoica, today called Agrosavia). Then, from 1995 to 1999, I served as the Director General of Colciencias, the Colombian science and technology policy agency, which today is the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Following this, I returned to international cooperation in agricultural research as part of a very interesting initiative organized in collaboration with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. This work led to the creation of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), with the support of the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and of a group of donors. Based at FAO headquarters in Rome, I worked as Executive Secretary of GFAR from 1999 to 2004. We carried out an interesting range of agricultural and rural development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Africa, in Asia, and in the Middle East. In these projects, I was able to apply many of the skills and methodologies that I learned and helped to develop during my IDRC years.
Since then, I have worked for three Colombian universities: Rosario University, National University, and Area Andina University. I am now working in an innovative rural development program at the territorial/local level. And now, more than ever, I am using the impact-assessment methodologies developed with the OPE team during my time with IDRC.
I am also currently collaborating with great Canadian initiative, an international network called GAMIP, the Global Alliance for Ministries and Infrastructures for Peace. GAMIP supports projects related to strengthening peace at the local community level in various regions of the world. For example, their Peace Professionalism project is aimed at supporting the development of the skills and methodologies that are required for the construction of peace.
It seems that I can’t stop working!
Bulletin 76
April 2025