Biography

Clara is an economist with comprehensive experience in public financial management and budgeting. She has worked on a number of projects advising governments and donors in these areas, for example, with the Ministry of Finance in Zimbabwe, supporting the process to develop a zero-based budget after a long period of hyperinflation in 2009 and 2010 and on the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative, undertaking case studies for their annual seminar in 2009 and 2011. Clara is currently working on a four-year contract for SIDA Tanzania, where she manages support to the country team on public financial management related areas. She has also worked on a number of evaluations such as one of the African Development Bank's Policy-Based Lending instruments from 1999 to 2009 and AusAID’s implementation of the Paris Declaration. More recently, she has undertaken studies on the extractive industry, modelling the macroeconomic and local impacts of mining in Peru and Ecuador. Prior to joining OPM, Clara was Technical Assistant to the Director General of the Nigerian Budget Office. As an ODI Fellow, she worked on the integral preparation of the annual budget at federal level, including elements of revenue and expenditure forecasting, as well as the identification of fiscal risks. She holds an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics where she obtained a distinction on her dissertation on the microfinance market. Clara is fluent in Portuguese, English and Spanish.