Dr. Azra Kacapor Nurkic is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of I4DI, and one of the international development sector’s most experienced monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) practitioners. With over 30 years of experience spanning program design, impact evaluation, and institutional capacity building — and work across more than 100 countries — she has shaped how some of the world’s largest development agencies and multinational corporations measure, understand, and act on their impact.
Azra founded I4DI in 2014 with a conviction that better evidence leads to better outcomes. Under her leadership, the firm has grown into a global MERL partner for organizations including USAID, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Labor, the World Bank, EBRD, Mars Inc., Gap Inc., Starbucks, and the Livelihoods Funds, and the Gates Foundation. Today, she is leading I4DI at the vanguard of AI and emerging technology in evaluation practice — pioneering the integration of machine learning, generative AI, and advanced analytics into how development impact is designed, measured, and communicated.
Before founding I4DI, Azra served as a Social Development Scientist at the World Bank, where she led the design of monitoring and evaluation systems for complex multi-sectoral youth and workforce development programs across Europe and Central Asia. At the American Council on Education, she developed USAID’s first Theory of Change for Higher Education and built a results-based information management system that became a model for portfolio-level learning. Earlier in her career, she led World Vision’s region-wide impact evaluation of its Area Development Programs and designed a $25 million research initiative to improve evidence-based programming for war-affected and vulnerable children across six countries. Her decade-plus of work with multinational corporations on environmental and sustainability objectives — particularly across agriculture value chains in Africa, Latin America, and Asia — has made her a recognized authority on how the private sector can credibly measure and advance its social and environmental commitments.
Dr. Nurkic holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Pécs in Hungary, an M.Sc. in Education from the University of Pristina, and a B.A. in Education from the University of Pristina. She speaks English, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and Macedonian.
