Dorian LaGuardia, Director

Dorian provides consultancy services for managing, assessing, and improving performance in the most complicated operating contexts.

With over 25 years of experience, he brings a unique perspective as both a “front-line” manager and a theoretician. Dorian has developed advanced performance systems to enable continuous improvements, adaptations, and better results overall. He has worked extensively on food security, direct cash assistance, emergency healthcare, livelihoods and resilience, and community engagement, amongst other issues.

He has managed engagements with over 20 UN organisations, 30 INGOs, and five donors. He has worked in DRC, Ghana, India, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, and Uruguay, and most countries in the Middle East. 

From his early experience at Valor Equity Partners (www.valorep.com) where they pioneered manufacturing supply-chain investment strategies that led to early investments in Tesla and SpaceX, to his innovative modelling of financial data to assess operational performance within the UN (WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR), to his work with donors in shifting towards value investing, Dorian pushes organisations to get better at what they do.

He has led on what many consider to be one of the most innovative and useful impact evaluations conducted for a humanitarian programme. He also led on a sophisticated ‘real-time’ third-party monitoring programme for UK Aid’s £160 million investment to prevent famine during the 2017 food security crisis in Somalia. Dorian’s work related to the Syria Crisis is cited for critical insights into the links between humanitarian action and value for money. He developed a proprietary tool for the collection and analysis of qualitative data that is fully emergent.

He has done extensive work on food security issues in east Africa, including an impact evaluation in Somalia that assessed food security (FCS, CSI, HDDS, RIMA II) and resilience across four household surveys over a three-year period and that included +2,000 households and counterfactual. This included the joint resilience strategy implemented by FAO, UNICEF, and WFP and a separate NGO consortium led by NRC. He has also done an evaluation of the OCHA country-based pool fund (CHF) in South Sudan that included emergency food security. He was also Team Leader for FCDO’s Monitoring and Evaluation of the Somalia Humanitarian Programme (www.mesh-somalia.net) that, amongst other activities, conducted over 200,000 surveys of people receiving direct cash assistance.

He led several evaluations related to the international community’s response to the Syria crisis including evaluations for FCDO, the EU, UNICEF, UNHCR and WFP, along with several evaluations for UNRWA including a longitudinal impact evaluation of an emergency job creation programme in Gaza; an evaluation of a major organisation-wide reform effort there; and evaluations of UNRWA’s medium term strategy, amongst other work for the agency.

He conducted a meta-evaluation of 86 evaluations conducted by SIDA and has done similar meta-assessments for FCDO.

He has been broadening his work to include complex issues like community engagement and risk communication and resilience in emergency and Nexus contexts.

Prior to his work related to humanitarian action, Mr. LaGuardia worked in mergers and acquisitions in the automotive and electronics sectors.  It was there that he developed a strong foundation for how to leverage data and analysis toward operational decision-making and performance.

He writes frequently on humanitarian action, technology, and measuring results at www.humanitarian-analytics.com.

Mr. LaGuardia has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MA from Harvard University.  A native English speaker, he has a working knowledge of Arabic, French, and Italian. He is an active member of ALNAP.