Samer Al-Samarrai

Samer Al-Samarrai

Senior Economist

Samer Al-Samarrai is a senior economist in the World Bank’s Education Global Practice. Since joining the Bank in 2011, Samer has worked on education projects and Advisory Services and Analytics in many countries in East Asia and in Eastern and Southern Africa. His recent projects have included the Secondary Education Quality Improvement and the Education Program for Results in Tanzania, the Skills and Higher Education Project in Malawi and the Africa Think Tank Platform with the African Union.  Samer co-authored the World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise and several other reports including, Assessing Basic Education Service Delivery in the Philippines and Teacher Reform in Indonesia. He was also the editor of The Role of Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers in Improving Education Outcomes. Before joining the World Bank, Samer was a senior policy analyst in the Global Monitoring Report team at UNESCO, where he was responsible for developing key themes and coordinating research on the challenges countries faced in achieving the Education for All goals. Between 2001 and 2008, Samer was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Sussex and a BSc and MSc from the London School of Economics.