History

Approach and Principles

Values

Staff

Partners and Associates

We recently reached an important milestone – 25 years of existence, which we celebrated with current and former clients, friends, associates and mentors – some of whom have been with us right from our beginnings. To commemorate our 25 years of providing services to our clients, we published a book, which not only depicts our experience in conducting monitoring and evaluation assignments but also portrays the lessons we have learned in working in this area.

Universalia was founded in 1980 by Dr. Gary Anderson and Dr. Charles Lusthaus, both professors at McGill University.

In our first decade (1980-1990) Universalia’s services and clients centered primarily on monitoring and evaluation for the Canadian international development market, and we grew from two to a dozen permanent staff.

From 1990 to 2000, we expanded our services to include project management, initially delivered through our sister company, Sigma VI, and significantly diversified our market – in addition to CIDA we counted IFIs, NGOs and several UN agencies as clients. We opened a Universalia office in Ottawa and a project office in Moscow. Our staff was multilingual and we began to develop a network of external associates in Canada and several developing countries.

The first five years of the new millennium have been far from dull at Universalia. In 2002, Dr. Marie-Hélène Adrien took the helm as president, replacing our founding president Dr. Gary Anderson. And in 2004, we opened the offices of a new joint venture – Universalia, Montalván and Associates – in Washington D.C. We also opened project offices in Managua, Nicaragua, and Pristina, Kosovo; expanded our services to include a wider range of international agencies; and brought new shareholders into the company.