Nampaka Nkumbula

UNDP Zambia, Accelerator Labs, Head of Experimentation

English

In building her career, Nampaka comes with a wealth of knowledge from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). At the IPA, Nampaka progressively served in various positions, which included Policy Associate and Senior Policy Associate and her last role was Policy Manager for Malawi and Zambia. She has experience working in the development sector promoting the use of rigorously generated evidence with partners, policy driven research, leveraging large administrative data systems to inform decision making processes and developing scaling pathways to move promising interventions from research to scale. Working in the Health, Education and Financial Inclusion sectors in Zambia, Nampaka also has experience in agricultural policy analysis and banking with a specific focus on fund management and marketing. As a successful applicant to the B360 internship at Credit Suisse, Nampaka worked in the Export Finance Department under Corporate and Specialty Lending as a Junior Portfolio Manager.

As Head Experimentation for the Accelerator Lab Zambia, Nampaka works with UNDP and partners in mapping the context and nature of development challenges, with a particular focus on understanding systemic issues beyond traditional silos and classifications and identifying drivers of change, and levers for intervention. She will also collaborate with UNDP stakeholders on the design of experiments across different sectors to validate the hypotheses and test the effectiveness of identified prototypes, including (but not limit to) defining variables, formulating hypotheses, and coordinating experimental protocols. She will support lab partners to develop an emerging pipeline of new initiatives, support other activities related to the design and operation of the Lab. This will contribute towards designing and delivering, engaging and meaningful methods for reflection on learning from experiments.

She holds a Master of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of Zambia (UNZA) and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics with Mathematics and Statistics from UNZA.