Anita van der Laan has more than 20 years experience working in international development in Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, the Netherlands and Indonesia. She has worked as advisor in gender; civil society strengthening; organisational development; design, planning, monitoring, evaluation & learning. She has managed capacity development projects and programmes, and teams of multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary advisors in Ethiopia and Nicaragua; worked at SNV Head Office as Senior Strategy Officer PM&E, and coordinated SNV’s global introduction programme for new advisors. Anita is a strong team player, an effective communicator both verbally and in writing in English, Spanish and Dutch. She is a highly experienced facilitator and trainer, good at inspiring and influencing colleagues and partners to realise improved performance. She is reflective, enjoys thinking outside the box, and combines working with great detail with zooming out to the bigger picture. She has designed PMEL quality standards, methodologies, tools, formats, guidelines, manuals, and has built the capacity of colleagues in 35 countries to use them effectively. Anita co-designed SNV’s methodology for developing Theories of Change (ToC) in 2008. She has since facilitated participatory ToC workshops to support numerous organisations and programmes to base their planning and monitoring on a strong base of concrete and shared intended development results.