Mira Gupta is a Lead Program Design and Innovation Consultant in the World Bank’s East Africa Urban Development Unit and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). She helped design the Digital Public Works for Urban Resilience (DPW) project in Kenya, a new approach to public works that is more inclusive of underrepresented populations such as single mothers and persons with disabilities. She serves as a technical lead on DPW, where she guides needs assessments, social inclusion strategy and data-driven innovation.
Mira joined the GFDRR Innovation Lab in 2017 to design the 12 projects of the Open Cities Africa initiative. In this role, she led the gender analysis, stakeholder engagement and human-centered design activities, to tailor programming to the unique needs in each city. She has provided advisory cross support to tasks teams in Social Protection and Labor; Social Sustainability and Inclusion; Health, Nutrition and Population; and to the European Space Agency’s secondee to the World Bank.
For her work in designing human-centered and impactful foreign assistance projects, Mira was named a 2016 Impact House fellow by IDEO U and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Social Impact Strategy. Outside the World Bank she has led program evaluations for the African Development Bank, the COMESA Secretariat and the U.S. Department of State. A U.S. national, Mira holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University.