Pura vida! I’m Jefferson

I'm from a rural town in Costa Rica, and I was the first person in my family, and one of the first in my community, to go to university. Growing up, I saw firsthand how development tends to stop at the city limits, how the State so often doesn't reach rural places. But I also grew up watching my parents fill that absence with their own hands, devoting themselves to community work where public institutions fell short. That contrast, between the help that never arrived and the people who showed up anyway, is the reason I do what I do.

It set me on a path that runs from implementation to evidence. I began inside the public sector, managing and redesigning the institutions meant to serve communities like mine, and learned that good intentions aren't enough; you have to understand how people actually experience a service. So I learned to co-create solutions alongside them, through participatory and design-thinking methods, sitting with the communities and public servants on the front lines. But sitting in those rooms raised a harder question: of everything we try, what actually works? That question pushed me toward rigorous quantitative evidence, causal inference and impact evaluation, to separate what genuinely improves people's lives from what only sounds good on paper. Today I work across all three: I can manage the reform, co-design it with the people it affects, and measure whether it truly worked.