November 2018 – The Gender Equality Initiative in International Affairs

Kalpana Kochhar will be joining GEIA’s new advisory group. Ms. Kochhar was appointed Director of the Human Resources Department (HRD) at the International Monetary Fund in June 2016. Prior to that, she was Deputy Director in the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department. Between 2012 and 2014, she was Deputy Director in the IMF’s Strategy, Policy and Review Department.

Before starting her career at the IMF, Ms. Kochhar was Assistant Professor at the George Washington University. She then joined the IMF’s Economist Program in 1988, assigned to the Asia and Pacific Department (APD). She worked on various country assignments in APD for six years before moving to the Strategy, Policy, and Review Department (SPR). In 1997, she returned to APD, where she was promoted to Assistant Director in 2003. While in APD, she led work on Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Bhutan, and Nepal, and has also covered China, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

In 2004, Ms. Kochhar moved to the IMF’s Research Department (RES) as a Senior Advisor, working closely with then Chief Economist Raghu Rajan, before returning to APD in 2008. In 2010, she left the IMF to join the World Bank as Chief Economist for the South Asia Region. She returned to the Fund in 2012, joining SPR as Deputy Director to lead work on the Triennial Surveillance Review, and then moved back to APD in 2014.

Ms. Kochhar also has extensive institutional experience. She served as Senior Personnel Manager in RES for two years, and again in APD during the downsizing of the IMF in 2006–08. She is currently a member of the Diversity Council, and also serves on the personnel Review Committee—appointments she also held before her move to the World Bank.

She has published extensively on a range of topics, including emerging markets, jobs and growth, gender and inequality issues and structural reforms, India and other Asian economies, and regional integration in South Asia. She currently leads the Fund’s work on jobs and growth, and has conducted groundbreaking research on gender inequality and its impact on the macro economy. She will continue to co-lead the Fund’s work on gender from HRD.

Ms. Kochhar holds a B.A. and M.A. in Economics from the Universities of Madras and Delhi, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University.

Elizabeth is the policy and partnerships lead for the gender unit at the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping/Department of Field Services. Prior to joining DPKO in September 2018, she was founding Head of UN Women’s Washington, D.C Liaison Office, where she significantly advanced the profile of UN Women with the U.S. Government

and foreign policy community in Washington.

Elizabeth was previously seconded by UN Women to the UN World Humanitarian Summit, where she was Gender Advisor, overseeing the agreement of a groundbreaking package of commitments to women and girls in humanitarian settings. Immediately prior to joining the UN, Elizabeth directed UN advocacy for the Women’s Refugee Commission in New York, working closely with the Security Council to increase its engagement on the protection and empowerment of displaced women and girls, and before that managed an international research study on sex trafficking from a health and human rights perspective at Massachusetts General Hospital. Elizabeth spent eight years working in London on international development and women’s empowerment issues, including as founding director of Women for Women International’s U.K. office.

Elizabeth holds a MSc in Women Studies and International Development from the University of York, U.K. and a BA in Political Science from the College of the Holy Cross. She is a board member of the Global Give Back Circle, which supports at risk girls in Africa, India, and China and is on the MacDowell Colony’s Young Friends Steering Committee.

Month: November 2018

Introducing New GEIA Advisory Group Member, Kalpana Kochhar

Introducing New GEIA Advisory Group Member, Elizabeth Cafferty