An international development legal expert, Conrad C. Daly has taken on work of a diverse and varied nature. In his decade-and-a-half of professional legal experience, most of which has been with the World Bank’s Legal Vice Presidency, Mr. Daly has focused on supporting legal, institutional, and governance activities. Working at the crossroads of human development and technology, he has extensive experience in the use of identification for development, data protection and privacy, cyberlaw and cybersecurity, justice reform, governance and anti-corruption, social service delivery, the disability-inclusive development agenda, the right to education, and facilitating UN agency engagement in World Bank-financed operations, as well as more general arbitration and mediation counseling experience.
Mr. Daly regularly offers technical legal advisory services to country operations the world over, though most frequently across Africa and MENA. He was the technical counsel for the preparation of Togo’s pioneering Program for Results operation to scale-up the government’s globally-recognized Novissi program to cover all extreme poor with shock-responsive safety nets (2023). He has been the technical counsel for preparation and implementation of both phases of the World Bank’s first regional Multiphase Programmatic Approach operation, the West Africa Unique Identification for Regional Integration and Inclusion (WURI) Program, which aims to deliver foundational unique verifiable digital ID credentials that facilitate access to human capital services across 6 participating countries—Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Togo—and the ECOWAS Commission, a program that won the World Bank President’s Award for Excellence (2018). He represented the World Bank over six years of deliberations before the United Nations in what emerged as the UNCITRAL Model Law on the Use and Cross-border Recognition of Identity Management and Trust Services (2022).
Mr. Daly has published widely, notably as the principal author of Combatting Cybercrime: Tools and Capacity Building for Emerging Economies (2024) and as co-author of the Playbook on Digital Social Protection Delivery Systems: Towards Dynamic Inclusion and Interoperability (2024), and has also contributed to numerous publications, including the Sourcebook on the Foundations of Social Protection Delivery Systems (2020). His speaking engagements are equally diverse, including as lead moderator at the Closing Plenary Session of the ID4Africa Annual General Meeting on the topic of “Reform of Legal Frameworks for Identity Management” (2024).
A dual U.S.- and French-educated attorney, Mr. Daly graduated with a Juris Doctor and Master 1 & Master 2 from a dual-degree program between Cornell Law School and the Ecole de droit de la Sorbonne (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). He is also a graduate of Heythrop College, University of London, where he read for a Master in systematic theology, and of Boston College, where he double-majored in biochemistry and in history and minored in Irish Studies. While in Paris as a Visiting Fellow at the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2), Mr. Daly researched issues in competition law, and lectured and researched on U.S. and U.K. constitutional and administrative law. Before making law his chosen profession, he worked at the Southern Medical Journal, where, among other things, he was the special projects editor for the grant-funded Spirituality–Medicine Interface Project.
His interests include hiking, camping, and the outdoors, theatre, and drawing/pen-and-ink.