Overview
Sara bridges research and development practice to improve the effectiveness and equity of policies and programs. She has worked across a broad range of policy issues related to private sector development, private-public partnerships, labour markets, skills development, gender and social inclusion. Many of her assignments take place in Africa and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but she also works in the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
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Sara has successfully managed her own consultancy business since 2003, with clients including the World Bank, UNDP, UNIDO, EU, African Development Bank, ILO, Sida, Danida, DfID, IKED, and more. Some of her recent accomplishments include:
- Strengthening the World Bank’s dialogue on employment policy with governments in Indonesia, the Western Balkans, Ghana, and Nigeria
- Supporting the World Bank’s analytical and strategic work on population aging, focusing on implications for human capital, employment, and social protection systems
- Advising the European Commission on strategies to ensure that girls access and benefit from technical training in Liberia
- Advancing public–private partnerships in skills development by supporting collaboration between UNIDO, Volvo, and a Zambian technical college to improve effectiveness and inclusiveness
- Guiding USAID strategy development on youth and private sector development in West Africa
- Serving on the Expert Group for Aid Studies, contributing to independent evaluation and analysis of Sweden’s international development assistance
Before starting her own business, Sara was a Senior economist in the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa department, where she contributed to the World Bank’s analytical and advisory work on growth, poverty reduction, and labour markets, mostly in Maghreb and Egypt. Before joining the World Bank in 1999, she worked with development cooperation policy (for the Development Assistance Committee, DAC) and innovation policy in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where she was admitted into the Young Professional Program in 1997.
Sara is an economist by training and received her Ph.D. in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1998. She holds a Licentiate in Economics (1996) and a Master of Business and Economics (1992) from the same institution. She is a former Fulbright grantee and spent one year in Harvard’s Economics Department as a visiting student.