Emeka Nwankwo has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of strategy and evaluation, with a particular focus on innovative ways to assess impact and causality, and to understand the social returns of financing and blended investments. A central thread in his work is redefining what success and impact mean across different cultural contexts. After leaving the Mastercard Foundation in 2023 as Director of Impact (Country Programmes), he now advises development agencies, philanthropies, and governments on strengthening cultures of inquiry, evidence, learning and accountability. Emeka recently led an assessment of localisation practices for IKEA Foundation’s approach to increasing local/proximate leadership. As a core collaborator with the MERL Tech Initiative, he is working to develop right-sized, adaptive MEL approaches for the Masakhane Research Foundation’s work on developing African Language Models and supportive ecosystems.