Victoria Kwakwa, a Ghanaian national, is the World Bank’s Country Director for Vietnam in the East Asia and Pacific Region, based in Hanoi. She is an expert in Economic Policy.

Ms. Kwakwa joined the World Bank in 1989 as a Young Professional. Since that time, she has held different positions in the World Bank including assignments as country economist, lead economist, and country manager. She has worked mainly in Africa but also in East Asia where she was a member of the economic team on Vietnam in the late 1990s.

Prior to her current assignment, Ms. Kwakwa worked as the Bank’s Country Manager for Rwanda, from January 2007. In this capacity she managed the World Bank’s program on Rwanda covering a broad range of issues, and including several innovative approaches to development assistance in areas such as health (notably results based financing), social protection and decentralization.These innovative approaches have provided important lessons for other World Bank programs in Africa and elsewhere. Ms. Kwakwa worked actively with government and development partners to strengthen aid harmonization and alignment and the use of country systems in delivery of development assistance.

As country economist and Lead Economist for Nigeria from October 2000- December 2006, Ms. Kwakwa led the World Bank’s economic advisory program on Nigeria, including working with the Country Director to deepen the Bank’s engagement at the level of individual states and undertaking analytic work on fiscal decentralization and state public expenditure analysis.During this period Ms. Kwakwa was a key member of the Bank team working closely with UK DFID to support the achievement of Nigeria’s historic debt cancellation in 2006. She was a member of the core team for the World Bank’s 2000/2001 World Development Report on Poverty.

Ms. Kwakwa holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Ghana, and Masters and PhD degrees in economics from Queen’s University in Canada.