Alina Sava is an Education Specialist with the World Bank, based in Bucharest, Romania. Alina has more than 20 years of experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating education policies and programs. She joined the Education Global Practice team at the World Bank in 2013, after advising education reforms in Romania for more than 17 years. She has been involved in conceptualizing, designing, and implementing projects dealing with a wide range of education topics, inter alia: early warning mechanism to prevent ESL, improving access to education for vulnerable groups from rural areas, functional analysis of the VET system, higher education reform, and education infrastructure.
Alina has supported education-related projects in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Uzbekistan. She is involved in tracking school reopening, collecting data related to the learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and preparing policy notes. She delivers results while collaborating with governance, social protection, disaster risk management, macroeconomics, Global Program for Safer Schools, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Some of the key recent papers she has co-authored include the Response Note to COVID-19 in Europe and Central Asia: Policy and Practice Recommendations, the Functional analysis of the VET sector in Romania, the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM) to prevent dropout, and Public Finance Review of Education.
Alina is an advisor for the Global Program for Safer Schools. Her research interests include equity in education, digital education focusing on classroom observation, and learning spaces in experiential education. She currently co-leads a Safer, Inclusive, and Sustainable Project and is preparing a digital education project and a school grants scheme to prevent early school leaving in Romania. Alina is a Ph.D. student in education sciences at Bucharest University. She holds a MA in Social Policies, an MBA from Tiffin University, and a BA in Economics.