Katherine Bain attended the University of Manchester where she graduated with a joint Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Modern Languages in 1990. She also obtained Diploma in Human Rights from the European Court, Strasbourg, France the same year. She graduated with a distinction from the London School of Economics in 1996 with a Master of Science degree in Social Policy and Planning in Developing Countries.
Between 1988 and 1989, she worked in urban shanty towns in Peru and from 1990 to 1991 as resident educator with the Joe Homan Trust, an international NGO working with orphans and street children in Mexico. Throughout the 80s and 90s she worked for a number of small and intermediary community based organizations, representing street children, the urban poor and women and children affected by conflict in C. America. She lived and worked on the street from 1989-1992 as a street educator with gangs for a Mexican NGO called Educacion con El Nino Callejero. Between 1991 and 1995, Ms Bain also worked in a variety of roles for the international community and ultimately the Mexican Government around the drafting of a new, national social policy.
She joined the Civil Society and Social Development team of the World Bank in 1996 where she supported the new President, James Wolfensohn in designing policies and processes for better incorporating civil society stakeholders in the World Bank’s day to day work. In 1997 she became the Team Leader and Senior Social Scientists in the Latin American and Caribbean Region and led pioneering work across the region to mainstream inclusive governance across the region’s products. In 2007 she moved to the Africa Region and was appointed Country Program Manager in the Ghana Country Office and was based in the field until 2010. Since returning to headquarters, Ms. Bain has led regional work on the demand for good governance, political economy and now leads the Programmatic Approach to Governance in Nigeria. The Programmatic Approach is a country level reform process aimed at improving the World Bank’s effectiveness in Nigeria through better attention to tailoring best practices to context, incuding through political economy work throughout the project cycle, adapting and learning during project implementation and learning by doing through Bank operations. It is being carried out in partnership with Harvard University and the Overseas Development Institute.