Jeffrey Telgarsky is Executive Vice President of Research and leads the International Projects department at NORC. He is responsible for all aspects of program development and project management for NORC’s international research and technical assistance activities, including client relations, development of partnerships and collaboration, quality assurance, financial management, and contract/subcontract administration. Since the creation of the International Projects department in 2005, he has led the development of NORC’s portfolio of international work, which now includes more than 70 current and completed projects in more than 30 countries.
Telgarsky is an economist and experienced senior manager with a strong background in development policy, democracy and governance, public finance, poverty alleviation, and monitoring and evaluation. He has worked with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GIZ), and the Inter-American Development Bank. He brings to his managerial role a strong background in a variety of technical areas, including monitoring and evaluation. He is currently NORC’s Project Director on three impact evaluations concerning agricultural programs – a food security program involving rice farmers in Burkina Faso and Sri Lanka, a capacity-building program for cotton farmers in six African countries, and a technical assistance and investment program promoting increased value-added for cashew growing and processing in five African countries. He has also completed evaluations for the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group.
Prior to joining NORC, Telgarsky served for 12 years as the director of the Urban Institute’s International Activities Center, where he managed three major regional USAID contracts in the fields of local government, housing, and urban development in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has published work on the development of policy think tanks, the institutional development of nonprofit organizations, housing privatization in Eastern Europe, and the linkages between urbanization and national economic development. As part of Urban Institute teams, he developed urban strategies for a number of USAID missions. These studies, carried out in Bolivia, Jamaica, Honduras, India, and the Caribbean, described and analyzed the urban sector with particular aspects emerging as key areas for USAID participation: in Bolivia, the informal sector; in Jamaica, land and shelter delivery; in Honduras, housing finance; in India, land development and delivery; and in the Caribbean, the relationships between urbanization, economic development, and the environment.