Selma van der Haar is a Development Economics/Impact Evaluation Advisor in KITs Impact Economics Team. She has over 9 years of experience in impact evaluation and applied policy research in agriculture and health.

Her work focuses on the interplay between global value chains, deforestation and land degradation and smallholder decision making, and wellbeing. She has studied the impacts of public policies (e.g. REDD+, agricultural development programmes), private sustainability programmes and standards (e.g. Fairtrade, RSPO, CSR programmes) and integrated landscape approaches. At KIT Selma is working on, amongst others, child labour and living income in the cocoa value chain and the effect of smallholder certification on deforestation.

Prior to joining KIT, she was a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and an Impact Evaluation consultant at APE Public Economics. In these capacities she has been involved in over a dozen policy evaluations and other research and development projects commissioned by, amongst others, the European Commission, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), and USAID.

Selma has lived in Kenya and worked in several countries in Africa (Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda) and Asia (Nepal, Indonesia). She has a strong interest in research methodology (including ToC assessment and OECD-DAC criteria) and is well-versed in a range of quantitative and qualitative research methods. She also has experience facilitating workshops and discussions.

Selma holds and MSc. in Development Economics from Wageningen University and an MSc. in Health Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is currently pursuing a PhD research in rural agricultural development, studying smallholder aspirations in relation to climate-smart agriculture policies in Ghana.