Dr. Deborah Caro
Co-Director
Deborah (Debbie) Caro is Co-Founder of Cultural Practice, LLC, and leads CP’s Health practice. She is an anthropologist with more than 25 years of experience in strategic planning, program design, evaluation, policy analysis, and research.
Debbie applies an intersectional approach to development challenges, with a focus on gender and socioeconomic equity, indigenous rights, and empowering participatory methods for research and evaluation. She has developed numerous analytical tools and methodologies to improve gender and sociocultural analysis and integration in social impact programs, and led the development of a ground-breaking community approach to prevent and confront gender-based violence. Debbie’s leadership of several high profile maternal health program evaluations has increased knowledge of high impact practices. Her analytical and applied work includes gender-, indigenous-, and age-focused assessments, evaluations, program design, and M&E and action plans across Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
Debbie holds a doctorate in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cornell University. She speaks fluent Spanish and is conversant in French and the Andean language Aymara.
Dr. Deborah Rubin
Co-Director
Deborah (Dee) Rubin co-founded Cultural Practice, LLC, determined to use anthropology, with its focus on context and cultural knowledge, to improve outcomes in international development. Dee works closely with groups leading the gender and agriculture development agenda, including USAID, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is a core team member of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP2), led by IFPRI, and has shaped the qualitative research supporting the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and WEAI for Value Chains (WEAI4VC).
Dee enjoys engaging the next generation of agricultural researchers to address gender issues and adopt mixed methods. She has worked extensively with both the land grant and private university communities, evaluating USAID-funded agricultural research grants and leading a team of agricultural scientists to identify new priorities for the agency’s investments in agriculture and natural resource management.
Dee holds a doctorate in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brown University. She is proficient in Swahili and French.
