Zehra Kacapor-Dzihic is a Senior Technical Advisor at I4DI, where she provides strategic evaluation leadership grounded in over 20 years of designing and conducting complex, multi-country evaluations for some of the world’s most prominent development institutions. Her expertise spans governance and democracy, public administration reform, social cohesion, civil society development, and social protection and inclusion — with a particular strength in theory-based evaluation methodologies including outcome harvesting and contribution analysis.

Zehra’s career has been defined by evaluations that shape how major institutions invest and reform. She has led independent country program evaluations for UNDP across Central Asia and the Western Balkans, UNICEF country program evaluations spanning four Balkan nations, and strategic evaluations of EU pre-accession assistance totaling billions of euros. She is currently leading the EU’s independent evaluation of its entire Yemen cooperation portfolio. Her work extends well beyond assessment — at UNDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she led a youth empowerment program that brought together all of the country’s political parties for the first time to jointly develop a national youth policy. At Forum Syd, she provided strategic leadership for a $6 million regional human rights and democracy portfolio across the Western Balkans. Throughout, she has conducted institutional and legislative reviews for the World Bank, led poverty and social impact assessments in fragile states, and built M&E capacity for governments and civil society organizations across more than 30 countries.

Zehra holds an M.Sc. in Public Administration and Development (with distinction) from the University of Birmingham, an M.A. in Human Rights and Democracy from the Universities of Bologna and Sarajevo, and a B.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Pristina. She speaks Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian, English, Macedonian, German, and Russian.