Janet Vähämäki is Team Lead for the Development & Aid Policy Team at SEI Headquarters. Janet is also the Director for the Swedish Development Research Network (SweDev), with a secretariat at SEI.
Janet’s research concerns governance of development aid and understanding trust patterns in development management.
Janet is active in two research projects financed by the Swedish Research Council. One that deals with when and how performance measurement requirements become counterproductive for organisations, and another that deals with trust patterns in development aid.
She holds a PhD in Business Administration from Stockholm Business School and a Master of Social Science in Political Science and International and Comparative Education from Stockholm University. In her PhD thesis she analysed how results based management had been applied in Swedish Development Cooperation since 1960’s.
Janet is a member of the Expert Group on Aid Studies and sits as a member of the board of Radiohjälpen.
Janet has previously worked for Sida (from 1998 to 2011) where she, among other posts, was the Director for the Department for Methodologies. She has also worked for the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, for development NGOs (e.g. Save the Children) and has conducted several consultancy assignments for organisations such as the OECD, Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Finland, the World Bank, and Swiss Development Cooperation Agency. She has lived and worked abroad in South Africa, Honduras and Brazil.