Narayan, Deepa

Ph.D., Iowa State University.

Narayan is Senior Adviser in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network of the World Bank and Lead Author and Team Leader for Voices of the Poor, a multicountry research initiative to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor.

She has more than 20 years of development experience in Asia and Africa and has worked for NGOs, national governments, and the United Nations system. Her work with the Voices of the Poor project has critically analyzed development assistance and its lack of success because outsiders presume to know what is best in a particular environment without building on the knowledge that already exists there. Among her most recent publications are three volumes about and for Voices of the Poor, From Many Lands, Can Anyone Hear Us? and Crying Out for Change, as well as a joint World Bank–World Health Organization publication on health issues titled Voices of the Poor: Dying for Change. She is also the author of Empowerment and Poverty Reduction: A Sourcebook. Currently, she is leading the development of an empowerment framework (that has influenced empowerment evaluation) for the World Bank.