About

I am a monitoring, evaluation, and research specialist who has spent the last decade facilitating data-driven decision-making in partnership with NGOs and government agencies, as well as research institutes and academia. My thematic work focuses on gender, inequality, poverty, livelihoods, and social policy, while my technical skills include quasi-experimental and correlative research design, qualitative, quantitative, and spatial data collection and analysis, and monitoring and evaluation system design.

As a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at CUNY’s Graduate Center, my current research explores two lines of inquiry. The first seeks to understand the causes and effects of cross-national gender difference in tax payment patterns. The second examines decoupling of policy from implementation in gender equality interventions by large governmental and non-government organizations, especially the World Bank.

My monitoring, research, and evaluation expertise has informed projects funded or implemented by UN Women, UNDP, ILO, World Bank, USAID, World Vision, Plan USA, WUR and others. Richards-Melamdir’s research and evaluation work includes projects in Uganda, Kenya, India, Nepal, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Haiti, Armenia, Georgia, and the United States.

The results of my programmatic work and academic research have been featured in several conferences, a UN Think Piece, policy briefs, a technical journal, and the International Journal of Sociology.