Page 6 - PAC Annual Report April 2022-March 2023

Annual Report 2023 After a little over six years as the Director and Chief Executive of the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), I will be stepping
From the Director’s Desk

down effective end of the financial year 2022-23. These past six years have been fulfilling and there have been many
work situations in which I thought to myself ‘It is really special that I have had the opportunity to experience this’.
These were situations that represented what I truly appreciated about serving as the director of an independent and
credible action research organisation. I will mention just two of them.

One is when I had the opportunity of doing fascinating action research work that spans every sector of society, bring-
ing together science, social science and people science overlaid with the transformative power of data analytics. In
particular, the work of the data analytics vertical that we established five years ago and the success we have had in
developing use cases in public health care and multi-dimensional poverty analysis. Data analytics in public gover-
nance will remain in the vanguard of the future action research of the PAC.

A second aspect has been of working with teams of young professionals dedicated to serve the discipline and the
public to help improve development outcomes. I have had the privilege of working under three different Chairs of
the Board (to whom I have reported), with a talented group of young researchers, and a number of staff members.
No leader accomplishes anything alone and so many people are involved in what we achieved. If I should list PAC’s
accomplishments during my time as CEO of which I am most proud, here are four that come to mind, picked to rep-
resent a variety of points of pride:
1. Developing the first PAC Strategic Framework that shaped the pace and direction of the PAC’s activities during
2017-2022. It helped us cope with the difficult COVID years, provided the basis to become resilient and make
wise decisions on resource allocation and project delivery
2. Establishing robust standards, processes and templates and institutionalising the quality assurance protocol.

6 Public Affairs Centre