Kaity Smoot is a Senior MEL Specialist at I4DI, bringing over 15 years of experience spanning program management, mixed-methods research, and agricultural market development. At I4DI, she designs and leads evaluations, develops MEL frameworks, and brings a practitioner’s lens to every assessment, grounded in years of building and running the very types of programs she now evaluates.

Kaity’s career has moved fluidly between doing the work and measuring it. At One Acre Fund, she spent six years across Rwanda and Ethiopia, first leading agronomy trials and scaling high-impact agricultural innovations, then designing and launching the organization’s first pilot programs in Ethiopia from the ground up as Deputy Country Director. That operational foundation carried into her MEL-focused roles at Land O’Lakes Venture37, where she led monitoring and evaluation across a portfolio of multi-year agricultural and market development projects funded by USAID, the Gates Foundation, and others. As an independent consultant, she has delivered final evaluations, MEL plans, and technical proposals for organizations including Winrock International, UNICEF, and Save the Children — working across agriculture, food security, WASH, and workforce development.

Having lived for seven years in Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire working closely with farmers and local stakeholders, Kaity brings firsthand understanding of the communities and contexts behind the data. She holds dual M.S. degrees in International Agricultural Development and Agricultural Economics from UC Davis and a B.A. in Economics from the College of William & Mary. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst, and is an advanced French speaker.