Sara Van Belle is a political scientist (MA) and anthropologist (MA), with a PhD in public health (LSHTM, 2014). She has a keen interest and expertise in governance, accountability and public sector reform, policy analysis, health systems and sexual and reproductive health. She also has experience in the development of research and evaluation methodology. She conducts workshops on theory-driven evaluation and realist evaluation.
Sara is Belgian and has professional experience in 12 African countries, with a focus on West Africa & the Great Lakes Region. She worked for multilateral and bilateral aid agencies as well as for INGOs. She lived in Senegal and worked at UNFPA West Africa Office, managed sexual and reproductive health programmes on the Africa team for Marie Stopes International and was a senior governance & institutional strengthening advisor for the Belgian Ministry of Development Cooperation.
She is currently a senior research fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium (ITM), coordinating the health policy and systems research methods and health policy courses. She also organized a course on global health governance and strategic decision-making at SciencesPo in Paris, France.
She is currently accountability consultant for the WHO human reproduction programme.