Kai Brand-Jacobsen serves as Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Government’s Independent Evaluation Department for Norwegian Development Cooperation. He has more than two decades experience working in large-scale evaluation processes and impact evaluation in conflict and war-affected crisis, and 28 years working in peacebuilding and crisis management across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
From May 2025 he is serving as the Chair of the OECD EvalNet Conflict and Fragility Working Group.Until 2024 he served as the President of the Romanian Peace Institute and Director of the Department of Peace Operations. In 2019 he was awarded the Mahatma Gandhi – Martin Luther King Jr. – Ikeda Lifetime Achievement Award for extraordinary contributions to humanity by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Alma Mater, Morehouse College. His work is one of the subjects of the documentary movie In Pursuit of Peace.
His current focus areas include evaluation in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, pioneering innovations in utilization of evaluation results in policy making and initiative design and implementation. He is dedicated to designing evaluation processes and practices to meet the needs of practitioners and policymakers, foster learning and improvement, and rooted in authentic and inclusive stakeholder and community engagement, empowerment, and participatory and collaborative approaches strengthening local and national ownership and capacity.