As Director of Learning, Measurement, and Evaluation at Co-Impact, Varja brings more than two decades of experience on organizational learning with civil society and public sector initiatives.

Prior to joining Co-Impact, Varja was a Research Scientist and the first “practitioner-in-residence” at MIT’s Governance Lab. Her role was to help bridge the academic and practitioner worlds through support to southern-based practitioner organizations and government actors working on initiatives to improve transparency, accountability, and participation in public sector programs. This included development and strengthening of organizational learning methods and frameworks, sharpening of theoretical underpinnings of the program, and co-design and implementation of evaluation and research.

From 2012 to 2018, Varja led the Learning, Monitoring, and Evaluation portfolio at Twaweza East Africa, a civil society organization focusing on producing evidence for accountability and action in the domains of basic education and open government in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. Before Twaweza, Varja was a researcher at Population Services International, implementing research portfolios and training research teams in several programs in Central and Eastern Europe and South East Asia. She began her career as a program officer at the World Health Organization (WHO), supporting a range of governments and WHO country offices in the implementation and research of HIV and adolescent health initiatives.

Varja holds a PhD and an MPH from Tulane University, and a BA (summa cum laude) from SUNY Binghamton. She has co-authored numerous papers and publications, most recently on evidence for accountability initiatives, and practitioner-academic collaborations. She is fluent in Slovenian, English, and Spanish, and can get her way out of trouble in a few other languages. She now lives with her husband and two daughters in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where she vows to not fight any windmills.