Stephen Parsons has a diverse range of experience in consulting and senior leadership roles across Australia, Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

Since 2014 he has focused on consultancy work both internationally and in the public sector in Australia. This has included program design and evaluation, development of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) frameworks, strategic and operational planning, environmental scanning and research, value for money assessments, competitor analysis, leadership development and training/coaching.

Stephen’s consulting experience has seen him work across a wide range of sectoral areas. For example, he was the Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist on the Design Team for the Samoa Education Sector Support Program, responsible for the development of the MEL Framework for the Australian and New Zealand support program to the Samoan education sector plan (2020-2024). Stephen has assessed an Australian Government disaster risk reduction initiative in the Philippines, evaluated a newly developed national system of needs assessment for students with a disability in Fiji, and reviewed the effectiveness of Australian volunteers working in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Laos, and their contribution to improved food security. He completed a formative evaluation of capacity-building initiatives in the Pacific, with a focus on Kiribati and Tonga, identifying the factors contributing to effective capacity-building activity in a range of government departments.

Stephen has demonstrated capacity to operate effectively in the challenging circumstances created by the global Covid-19 pandemic. He has worked with RCG colleague Scott Rankin to provide monitoring and evaluation advice and support to the MIT Solve initiative, a partnership between Australian DFAT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Atlassian Foundation that aims to prepare disadvantaged youth for the workforce of the future. This has involved monitoring performance of the grant recipients operating in Cambodia, India and Indonesia against the MEL Framework, gathering information and recording lessons learned – this work has been completed remotely using a range of online platforms. More recently, Stephen has taken an ongoing role as the MEL Advisor to Aus4Skills Vietnam, a large DFAT-funded human resource development project. In this role he works closely with the Vietnamese MEL Manager to develop and maintain effective MEL policy and practices across a complex range of activities which are being delivered in partnership with multiple Vietnamese Government agencies.

Stephen has a background in secondary school teaching and his early career included two years teaching in a mining township in Botswana as part of the Australian Volunteers Abroad program, followed by an English language teacher training project in Vietnam. Subsequent positions included an executive role at Australian Volunteers International, and two years as the Human Resources Adviser on a UNDP-coordinated governance and public administration reform project in Laos. In 2005 Stephen took up leadership roles in International Relations and in the Teaching and Learning Unit at the University of South Australia. During this time, he was also awarded an Australian Government–funded placement at the International Islamic University Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.

Stephen holds a Bachelor of Education, and a Master of Development Studies. More recently he completed a Master of Evaluation at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Governor’s Leadership Foundation in South Australia and a member of the Australian Evaluation Society.