Lissandra Nadia Ellyne

Biography

Lissandra Ellyne is a doctoral fellow at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy analyst at RAND. She holds a master's degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in philosophy and economic ethics from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. Prior to PRGS, she worked as a junior professional associate economist at the World Bank and as a journalist at New Europe. Her work focused on small and medium enterprise development projects, as well as access to finance, agribusiness and innovation studies in Africa. In Mali, she restructured the Growth Support Project, redesigning the project's budget, activity, coordination, and monitoring and evaluation frameworks. In Niger, she designed and ran a rural access-to-finance survey. She also generated a database of performance indicators for micro, small, and medium enterprise development projects across the Africa Finance and Private Sector Development Department.

In addition to her field experience at the World Bank, Ellyne has also worked in Uganda with IRI, in Zambia with the UNDP, in Argentina with the Microfinance Program of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, and in South Africa with Shawco, teaching entrepreneurship in townships. Ellyne specializes in statistical programing, designing and analyzing survey data, and producing qualitative evaluations and reports. Her research interests involve using surveys and experimental methodologies to evaluate the impact of polices aimed at increasing finance and private sector development in developing countries.