Mary McNeil is the Task Team Lead for development of the Global Partnership for Social Accountability. She developed the model for the Affiliated Networks for Social Accountability, or ANSAs, that are now active in Africa, East and South Asia and Middle East North Africa, and has been involved in citizen participation, community-driven development, and social accountability work for most of her twenty-five years in the World Bank. She is the co-editor of Demanding Good Governance: Lessons for Social Accountability Initiatives in Africa, and is founding editor of the Bank's flagship publication Development Outreach. During her career in the Bank she has held positions in the World Bank Institute, where she managed global programs on community empowerment and social inclusion and civil society capacity building, and operationally in the water and sanitation and urban sectors, where she led activities in the UNDP-funded Water and Sanitation Program and Urban Management Program. Her work has spanned all regions, including managing country-based programs in Ghana, Bosnia, the Philippines and Tajikistan.
Prior to joining the Bank she was a journalist working for Congressional Quarterly, where she covered environmental affairs, and an editor for the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy of Sciences. She holds a Masters Degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she was the Joel Leff Fellow in Political Economy, and a BA from Wake Forest University.