Abdirahman Zeila is a soil scientist by training and a Senior Environmental Engineer in the World Bank’s Eastern & Southern Africa region, where he leads environmental, social, and climate-risk work in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Based in the Lusaka office, he advises government counterparts on project design and supervises E&S implementation in the two countries. Since joining the World Bank in 2017, he has helped grow Somalia’s IDA lending program, beginning with his contribution to the post-drought Somalia Drought Impact and Needs Assessment (DINA) and continuing through the preparation of flagship operations such as the Somalia Urban Resilience Project II, Baxnaano, and Somalia Water for Rural Resilience (Barwaaqo) Project. He led the Somalia Country Environmental Analysis (2018-20), co-authored the Somalia Climate Risk Assessment, and helped to manage capacity-building support to Somalia’s nascent environmental, social, and security-risk institutions. A frequent contributor to peer-reviewed literature, Abdirahman has published on drought monitoring, soil organic-carbon dynamics, and forest-cover change in arid environments. His 2022 article in Sustainability quantified carbon stocks under contrasting land-use systems in western Kenya, while his remote-sensing study of Somali forest loss (2000-19) is being released as a monograph. Before the Bank, he implemented soil-health and climate-smart-agriculture programs across eastern and southern Africa with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and conducted dryland-tree-management research at ICRAF. He holds a PhD in Soil Science from Kenyatta University, where his dissertation developed smallholder-focused carbon-sequestration accounting models, and is certified in GIS-based environmental monitoring and evaluation.