Tina George is a Senior Social Protection Specialist and Regional Task Team Leader with the Africa West & Central region of the World Bank. With a career in human development spanning two decades, Tina’s work focuses on strengthening state capabilities and service delivery interventions for the poor and vulnerable. She brings a depth and breadth of experience in operations and analytics across regions, leading teams, and driving transformational programs within complex political economy and institutional contexts in 60+ countries.
In 2023, she led the preparation of Togo’s pioneering IDA Program for Results operation to scale up the government’s globally recognized Novissi program to cover all extreme poor with shock-responsive safety nets, with a focus on women’s digital financial inclusion and savings. In 2018, she led the World Bank’s first regional Multiphase Programmatic Approach operation with a multidisciplinary team, covering 6 countries - Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Togo - and the ECOWAS Commission to deliver regionally interoperable foundational digital identifiers to facilitate access to human capital services for 100 million people, which won the President’s Award for Excellence. Previously, she served as Global Co-Lead for Social Protection Delivery Systems, where she represented the World Bank on the Digital Economy Task Force under the 2018 Argentine G20 Presidency.
She is a lead author of several publications, including the forthcoming “Playbook on Dynamic Inclusion and Interoperability” (2024), “Novissi Togo: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Shock-Responsive Social Protection (2023), “Sourcebook on the Foundations of Social Protection Delivery Systems” (2020), “Investing in People: Social Protection for Indonesia’s 2045 Vision” (2020), “Social Registries for Social Assistance and Beyond” (2017), and Bringing Government to the 21st Century: Korean Digital Governance Experience (2015). She has been invited to contribute as a thought leader and speaker by forums such as, Columbia University on India: The Next Decade (2023), World Food Program on Women and Digital Financial Inclusion (2023) and Food Security and Shock-Response (2022), Government of India on Aadhaar 2.0: Ushering the Next Era of Digital Identity and Smart Governance (2021), and MIT on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work (2019).
She holds a PhD from Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands.