Head of COVID-19 Task Force Secretariat, World Bank Group
Priya Basu heads up the newly established Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) Secretariat in the Global Themes Vice-Presidency at the World Bank Group. Priya has focused her career on developing and implementing innovative solutions to some of the most pressing development challenges of our time. Prior to joining the World Bank Group, she has previously held the positions of Economist at the International Monetary Fund in the Capital Markets Development Department. In addition, she experienced as Economist at the International Labour Organization and at the UNCTAD. Since 1998, when she begun as Youn Professional, she has been part of the World Bank Group, holding several crucial positions, mainly based in Washington D.C. as Lead Economist in the Bank’s South Asia Region, Priya and her team reshaped the Bank’s finance and private sector engagement strategy for India and built up a multi-billion-dollar lending and advisory program, with a focus on SMEs and financial inclusion for the underserved. Priya Basu served as economist in the Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region, where she worked on bank restructuring in Russia in the aftermath of the GKO crisis, and in the Finance and Private Sector Vice-Presidency, where she worked on Indonesia’s banking and financial sector restructuring program in the aftermath of the 1997 East Asian crisis.
