Jo Puri
Dr. Jyotsna (Jo) Puri has devoted her career to generating, using and advocating for transparency and credibility in markets, financing and international policy, and thinking about incentives to ensure that markets and public policy are impactful. She has worked to work across disciplines to support the use of high quality evidence in development in her thirty year development career. In her various roles as Assistant Secretary General at the United Nations, as head of the independent evaluation office at the Green Climate Fund, as the deputy director and head of Evaluation at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), and as head of strategy and knowledge at IFAD, co-chair of the International Land Council and as an invited expert at the UNEP led Adaptation Gap Report as well as the lead author of the Rural Development Report 2025, Dr. Puri has led and worked patiently to ensure that transparent operations and policy are used at the highest level of decision making in the international arena and that markets are built, shaped and developed around these areas.
Jo is currently the Director of Policy and Programme at UNEP. More recently she is working on the incentives for the international financing system to see how greater and better quality financing can be directed towards global goods including and especially climate adaptation.
Puri is an expert in climate finance, international development and impact evaluation, with close to 30 years of experience in the multilateral sector. Till August 2024, Jo was the associate vice president of strategy and knowledge at IFAD. In this role, she spearheaded the work on technical quality of IFAD operations and investments in more than 80 developing countries and with international treaties and agreements while and leading a 200 person global team. She was also the co-chair of the International Land Coalition (2022-4). Most recently (September 2024- February 2025) she was Strategic Advisor to the President of IFAD where she led the development of IFAD’s strategy (2025-2031) and its flagship Rural Development Report focusing on financing rural transformation.
Dr. Puri was the keynote speaker at the European Evaluation meeting held in Rimini, Italy (2025), at the Young Economist’s conference hosted by IIT Powai, Mumbai, India (2025), and at CIRAD’s 40th year celebration, at Montpellier, France (November 2024).
Between 2017-20, Jo was the inaugural Head of the Independent Evaluation Office of the Green Climate Fund. She oversaw the First Performance Review of the GCF, that provided the blueprint for GCF’s new strategy. She also initiated the Data Lab and the Behavioral Science lab at the IEU. Jo has advocated for evidence-driven policies and programmes at the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) where she was the deputy executive director and head of evaluation. Jo is currently also an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where she teaches development effectiveness and is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington DC.
Jo has played an instrumental in conceptualising resilience credits that provides a model for incentivizing financing for climate adaptation. She has contributed to several high-level policy groups within the UNFCCC and UNEP. Dr. Puri has authored numerous academic articles and reports on climate resilience, impact evaluation, and innovation. She also serves on the board of Innovations for Policy Action (unpaid). Dr. Puri holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of Maryland, USA, and an M.A. in Development Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, India.
