Camila Fernández has expertise evaluating international early childhood development and educational programs aimed to improve children’s development, school readiness, and educational achievement. She has designed instruments for large-scale randomized evaluations in Latin America and has experience with quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods.
Fernández currently serves as international senior researcher for three experimental evaluations of reading programs in Peru and Guatemala funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. She led the adaptation of early-grade literacy assessments and designed teacher and household surveys and classroom observation instruments for the impact evaluations in Peru and Guatemala. She currently leads the qualitative component of the implementation studies and monitors multicounty survey data collection efforts in those countries.
Before joining Mathematica in 2011, Fernández was assistant professor of psychology at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. During that time, she collaborated in the evaluation of the national subsidized child care program Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar, led the qualitative component of the mixed-methods evaluation of the national initiative for rural education, and co-led studies on risk factors for dropping out of school early funded by the Ministry of Education of Colombia and other nongovernmental organizations. She was the assessment and curriculum implementation consultant for the Center for the Evaluation of Development Policies at the Institute of Fiscal Studies on a randomized controlled trial of an integrated early childhood program delivered to beneficiaries of the Colombian conditional cash transfer program Familias en Acción.
Fernández holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from New York University. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications, including BMJ, Social Science and Medicine, and First Language.
This International Literacy Day, researchers, implementers, policymakers, and government ministries must come together to identify how best to help vulnerable populations recover from learning loss suffered during the pandemic, and support teachers, parents, and caregivers to ensure learning can continue when traditional in-person learning is interrupted.
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