Meera Shekar is Global Lead for nutrition and Lead HNP Specialist with the World Bank’s Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice. Over the last several years, she has led the repositioning of the nutrition agenda within the World Bank and with partners that led to the new global Scaling-up Nutrition (SUN) initiative. The SUN movement is now supported by over 54 client countries and over a hundred global partners. Meera has been one of the principals for the emerging aid-architecture for the SUN, and the G8 and G20 agenda-setting process for food security and nutrition over the last several years. She leads the global and country-level SUN costing and financing analyses in the World Bank. She also works on analytics and operations on the demographic dividend and population and development issues.
Meera has lived and worked across the globe and has extensive operational experience in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Vietnam, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Before joining the World Bank in 2003, she led UNICEF’s Health, Nutrition and Water and Sanitation teams in Tanzania and the Philippines. Meera has a PhD in international nutrition, epidemiology and population studies from Cornell University and has consulted extensively including with JHU Population Communications Services and Population Services International. Among other publications, she is the author of the health chapter in the World Bank’s flagship report entitled eTransform Africa: the Transformational use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, 2012; Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development, 2006; and Scaling-up Nutrition –What will it cost 2009? Meera is an Adjunct professor at Tufts University, USA, and has been a guest speaker at several G8 preparatory events including the G8 parliamentarians’ conference in Canada.