Bloggers
A recent addition to the Development Marketplace core team, Edie Wilson specializes in how strategic communication and partnerships can be deployed to accelerate the speed and deepen the impact of innovation in international development. At this competition, this means finding new ways to engage with social media, create video content, and empower all the finalists and participants to present their innovative solutions to a global audience. Edie understands where many of the finalists are coming from -- she grew up in a family passionate about both international development and hi-tech venture startups, and lived and traveled in Ethiopia. At age 21, she became a social entrepreneur herself, launching an advocacy NGO on food and hunger issues in the United States and raising funds for a small staff and program. Since then, she's worked in senior positions in government, the private sector and civil society. For the past ten years, she's been an advisor at the World Bank, specializing in multi-stakeholder processes. governance and anti-corruption, and economic reform. She holds a Masters in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she met her husband Ron Seckinger, and speaks French and more Spanish than she generally admits.
Aleem joined the World Bank Institute as Practice Manager for Innovation in November 2009. Previously, he was Head of Global Development Initiatives at Google.org and Chief Executive Ofifer of the Aga Khan Foundation in Syria. Aleem was trained as a social anthroplogist and urban planner at Emory University and MIT. For fun, Aleem flies kites with his 3 year old, plays tennis, and finds cool apps for his iPhone.
He also writes about grassroots journalism on the Web for Online Journalism Review and contributes op-ed pieces to the Washington Post. Tom is new to the Bank, but not entirely to the world of developing countries. He was adviser to the press in the Slovak Republic, where he was stationed, in Bratislava, under the ProMedia program in 1996-1997.
Elena is the Development Marketplace Communication Officer and the administrator of this blog. She is an Italian national specialized in strategic communication and social marketing who started her career working for the private sector in Italy. Her motivation and passion for development took her to Honduras where she spent two years working as Communication Officer for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). She moved to Washington DC in 2004 to design and implement communication projects and awareness campaigns for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she had the opportunity to develop advocacy, participatory and social marketing strategies on several social issues. She believes that strategic communication can make a difference in development and considers herself lucky for having had the privilege of working both with celebrities raising awareness with policymakers and with local communities including them in development processes. Elena holds a Master Degree in Direction of Communication from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB).
The South Asia Rural Livelihoods Cluster includes World Bank project teams and implementing teams in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka who are implementing multi-sector programs targeted to the poor. Livelihoods projects focus on building institutions of the poor, empowering them, building their capacity, and aggregating them so they have the bargaining power to negotiate for better consumer prices, and better prices for their goods, and to access financial resources.
Hailing from an agricultural family from a village in India, Ranga is interested in simple technologies in water treatment, pumping, communication and home lighting to make the life of women and children better, safer and more productive. Ranga won the 2006 Development Marketplace with a project for the development of portable LED home lights in India. Ranga is the founder president of THRIVE and has 16 years experience as a consultant in Public health systems in World Bank funded health projects in India, JICA funded projects in Uzbekistan, Malawi, and UNICEF in Afghanistan. Ranga has an MBA and Ph.D in information systems and he worked as post doctoral Takemi fellow in Harvard School of Public Health.
Joachim had earlier trained as a geologist in Nigeria and later earned a Master of Science degree in Water and Environmental Management from the Water Engineering Development Centre at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. He is currently a member of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) UK and the Society Exploration Geophysicist (SEG) USA.
Andrew is a 25 year agribusiness veteran although a fairly new recruit to IFC Agribusiness where he is a Senior Industry Specialist with global responsibilities. He has worked for many years in large scale operational agriculture in developing countries latterly at a senior management level in Asia Pacific focussing on plantation crops. He was educated at the University of Reading and the Royal Agricultural College in the UK. Technically he likes to work in practical approaches to sustainability, mechanisation, technical training and soft commodity crop production.
Scott Poynton has served as Executive Director of the Tropical Forest Trust (TFT) since its inception in March of 1999. He anchors the organization with a deep knowledge of timber operations in tropical countries gained from two decades of experience managing a variety of complex public and private sector forestry and wood production initiatives in 19 countries. Poynton helped establish the TFT while working as Managing Director of the Vietnam subsidiary of ScanCom International, the world’s largest supplier of wood outdoor furniture products. Poynton presided over tremendous growth in ScanCom Viet Nam while simultaneously developing a company-wide environmental policy to verify the legitimacy of tropical timber used by its Southeast Asian suppliers and manufacturers. Prior to his work at ScanCom, Poynton served as a forestry specialist for the World Bank, where he led forestry-related economic development efforts in Romania, Vietnam and India. In addition, he headed up a variety of projects in Vietnam, Laos, Russia and Papua New Guinea for an international consultancy that helps private sector companies improve forest business and management practices. Poynton began his career in forestry when he was only 21 years old and one of his first jobs involved supervising planning for wood production for a large native Eucalyptus forest in Tasmania. Poynton holds a Master of Science (Forestry) from Oxford University where he was awarded the Oxford Forestry Institute’s Jubilee Prize.
Andy Schroeter, director of Sunlabob Renewable Energy Co. Ltd., is a successful German entrepreneur, who is looking back on 25 years of technical experience in renewable energy, infrastructure and operational logistics . During his 18 years of experience as company designer and manager in countries such as Germany, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Nigeria and Canada, he has implemented numeral visions of technical and design concepts that many have never thought possible. His projects in the field of renewable energy have been recognized and awarded by the Development Marketplace of the World Bank in 2005, the German Solar Award 2005 and BBC World Challenge in 2006, awarded by the Ashden Award in 2007 and recently he won the African Lighting Award organized by the World Bank. They are standing out by highly innovative standards. Andy Schroeter is a professional in project and company design, management, technical design as well as practical implementation of renewable energy conceptions, financial management and rural development. Besides the work in his own company, he is constantly involved in new conceptions, e.g. as a practical advisor for the government and the private sector . His 9 years of work in Laos with Sunlabob Renewable Energy Co. Ltd. have had a significant effect on rural and country -wide infrastructural development. Besides, his efforts have been showing to provide commercially viable and affordable energy service to remote areas in Lao s which are off the grid.
Aaron is a Communications Consultant with the Development Marketplace Team and the administrator of the DM Blog. Originally from Minnesota, Aaron came to Washington in 2006 to work with Pact’s Capacity Building Services Group, a global consulting and action research unit devoted to improving the management and governance capacity of nonprofit institutions and municipal governments. Focusing on contests, networks, strategy formulation, and applications for new web technologies in development, Aaron’s work brought him to countries ranging from Bolivia to Malawi, Pakistan and Cambodia. He believes that open competitions and web 2.0 technologies and are powerful mechanisms for sourcing and promoting innovation in development. Aaron has over five years of consulting experience in both the public and private sectors. He holds a Master of Public Administration degree from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Rasmus is a development economist with a passion for poverty and natural resources and how they interface. He has published extensively in academic journals on poverty, forestry, social protection, and climate adaptation and has worked in many countries including Pakistan, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, China, Maldives, Armenia, and Tajikistan. Rasmus currently works in the World Bank’s Social Development department based in Washington, where, among other things, he administers the Trust Fund for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development—the premier WB trust fund covering the poverty-social-environment nexus and supported by Norway and Finland. A citizen of Denmark, Rasmus holds a Ph.D. in development economics from the University of Copenhagen. This is his first time blogging and he is excited to explore with his readers on how to bring about pro-poor adaptation.
Zeeshan works on Knowledge Management issues within the East Asia Region's Disaster Management Team. He joined the World Bank after a two year stint at the United Nations in New York City. Zeeshan is a Board Member for Americans for Informed Democracy and the Muslim Consultative Network. His work has been published in Q-News (UK), The World Scholar (USA), Pakistan Post (USA), The Epoch Times (USA) and The Nation (Pakistan). Originally from Pakistan, Zeeshan has moved back and forth between both the US and Pakistan and will soon be an unofficial ambassador for both countries. He has advanced leadership certifications from the Institute of Student Leadership at Paper Clip Communications as well as the National Conference on Student Leadership, and has an MA in International Relations and a BBA in International Business, both from the City University of New York.
Abhas K. Jha is an urban infrastructure specialist and has been with the Bank since 2001 in the Board (as Advisor to the Indian ED), and with the LAC and ECA regions. Mr. Jha has previously held positions in the Government of India (the Ministry of Finance and earlier in the state of Bihar). He has been Regional DRM Coordinator in ECA and also led the Bank's Urban, Housing and DRM work in Mexico, Jamaica and Peru. Mr. Jha holds graduate degrees in Finance from Johns Hopkins University and in Economics from the University of Madras.
Ashna Mathema is an urban planner/ architect, with some 12 years of experience in housing and urban development. She is a housing specialist, and her work has involved extensive field work in low-income settlements and slums in over 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She is currently involved advisory work in low-income and informal settlements in India, Tanzania, and Uganda. Prior to the Bank, Ashna worked as an independent consultant for several years, during which she also worked for other development agencies including the Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, DFID, UN-Habitat, and USAID. With a background in architecture, experience in low-income housing, her on-going work in housing finance, and a strong personal interest in disaster-resistant construction, she is looking for a way to knit these pieces together to promote sustainable development that is "green", and at the same time, "affordable" to the masses in developing countries. This is a clear challenge, but achievable, in her opinion, with the right sorts of technologies, financing mechanisms, and incentive structures.
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Yvan Perrin (Green Earth Concept) is one of the DM2009 finalists with a project to create an organic rice farm and resilience fund as a sustainability model. The project seeks to link adaptation to development.
