Staff Profile: Suzanne Cloutier

Suzanne Cloutier has no fear of zipping through the rivers of Guyana to explore remote villages and the country’s many waterfalls, but mention tackling the highways, and her reservations begin to show.

“I’m a little nervous about driving here. I thought drivers were crazy in Botswana, but it’s even crazier here! I’m still working up my nerve for that,” Cloutier admitted.

Cloutier, who most recently lived and worked in Atlanta, moved to Guyana in August to begin her job as the resident Monitoring & Evaluation adviser within the Ministry of Health and National AIDS Program Secretariat.

Before joining MEASURE Evaluation in 2009, Cloutier worked on global health projects at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  After earning her Master of Science in Public Health in epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill, Cloutier completed a two-year fellowship in the Public Health Information Program at CDC. Afterward, she stayed on as a fellow and started working for a tuberculosis surveillance project in Botswana. 

“While I was in Botswana, I attended an M&E workshop, so I was familiar with MEASURE Evaluation's work, and I knew what a good organization it was,” Cloutier recalled. Her mentor at UNC-CH encouraged Cloutier to look into job opportunities at MEASURE Evaluation.

A month into her MEASURE Evaluation job in Guyana, Cloutier said it already “feels like home,” even though not all of her things had arrived yet. Her most memorable experience so far was taking an hour-long river voyage to a remote Amerindian village, where she met a local family who invited her to their house for a celebratory dinner (it was the mother of the house’s birthday).

Cloutier is enthusiastic about helping the people working in her project look at their data in new and analytical ways.

“Hopefully, they’ll see M&E as a tool to help them with the work they’re doing and not as a burden. And I think it’s true that when people start using data, the quality of the data improves,” she said.

And in her free time, Cloutier is looking forward to exploring the capital city as well as the country’s wild side. 

“Guyana is so beautiful. I just really like to be out in nature, and I can’t wait to take more trips into the interior,” she said. By that point, hopefully Cloutier will have mustered up her courage to drive on Guyana’s highways – or have found a traveling buddy with a car.