Ahmed Raza

**Economist

Data Scientist

Policy Researcher**

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

Ahmed is a global citizen - a structured thinker, trained in economics, finance, data science and technology. He is skilled in econometric modeling, design thinking, optimized analysis and building scalable data architectures for advanced technical workflows, ready for innovation with AI.

He is a trained researcher with proven expertise in navigating complex data landscapes and implementation challenges. His research interests usually lie where development and data meet. His work on promoting evidence based policy-making has allowed him to culminate affiliations with renowned institution(s) such as World Bank Group, Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID), CERP, & BSE.

He enjoys longboarding for balance and good music for harmony.

🌍 Global Experience: 🇵🇰 || 🇪🇸 || 🇨🇦 || 🇺🇸 ||

🔗 Connect With Me

🔬 Research Focus

Evidence-Based Policy Making
Applied Econometrics & Causal Inference
Financial Economics & International Trade
Education & Human Capital Development
ESG & Sustainable Development
Technology Policy & Artificial Intelligence
Research Design & Data Architecture
Multi-dimensional Indicator Creation

💼 Work History

Consultant Economist & Data Scientist
World Bank Group
April 2019 – June 2025

Project Manager
July 2018 – April 2019

Senior Research Associate
Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP)
June 2016 – July 2018

Teaching Fellow – Rethinking Financial Inclusion
Harvard Kennedy School
April 2016

Research Associate
Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP)
June 2014 – June 2016

🎓 Education

MSc in Specialized Economic Analysis
Barcelona School of Economics — June 2014
(Concentration: International Trade, Economics & Development Economics)
Evaluated by WES as equivalent to a Canadian Master’s degree

BSc (Honors) in Economics & Finance
Lahore School of Economics — June 2013
Evaluated by WES as equivalent to a Canadian Bachelor’s degree

🏆 Certifications & Awards

Project Management and Change Management for Development — World Bank Group (2026)
Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner — IBM (2025)
Cybersecurity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — World Bank Group (2024)
Social Media Engagement — World Bank Group (2023)
VPU Team Awards Winner — World Bank Group (June 2023)

📌 Selected Projects & Publications

Global Education Policy Dashboard - (GEPD)

Provided strategic and technical leadership, guiding methodology, implementation & analysis, for the World Bank’s Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD), a flagship multi-country innovation platform implemented in countries including Peru (first and second round), Ethiopia (multiple rounds), Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Pakistan.

This project combines several data iniatives at the Education Global Practice to give a detailed systematic overview of education sector and offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment in education eco-system at country - level , and policy reforms that are suited to a country-specific context.

State of Global Learning Poverty - 2022 Update

The Learning Poverty indicator combines primary-aged children out-of-school and pupils below a minimum proficiency in reading, along with 3 complimentary concepts of learning poverty level, gap, and severity. It is a multi-dimensional metric which enabled standardized global, regional, and country-level monitoring of foundational reading skills, directly informing the World Bank’s operational strategies, policy dialogue, country reports, analytical products and investments aimed at halving Learning Poverty by 2030 across client countries.

Lead architect of the core analytical framework and simulation model estimating COVID-19 impact on global learning poverty. Developed and maintained core components of GLAD and Learning Poverty repositories.

Pakistan – Human Capital Review: Building Capabilities Throughout Life

Led the econometric analysis and production of the World Bank’s flagship country report on Pakistan’s Human Capital Review, applying Mincerian wage regressions, Probit models, and Heckman selection corrections to quantify returns to education and the role of cognitive and socioemotional skills in labor market outcomes. Designed accompanying data visualizations and infographics that effectively communicated complex findings on stunting, learning poverty, utilization-adjusted HCI, and demographic dividends, directly informing national policy priorities on human capital development and economic inclusion.

This report calls for a long-term commitment to building human capital throughout life and advocates for intersectoral linkages and continuity of policies to enhance human capital in Pakistan.

Data - Depot Pakistan

Devised & implemented a systematic & scaleable data cleaning, harmonization, and analysis strategy for the assembly and aggregation of 100+ complex micro-datasets from multiple data sources like household surveys, government censuses, and administrative/monitoring datasets. All applicable code behind this initiative is open-source and available on GitHub.

Calculated key education indicators, created proprietary panels of point estimates from harmonized data across multiple sources, and developed a scalable R Shiny application that supports proactive indicator tracking and provides open access to standardized microdata.

Added value in the data landscape by creating public data good for informed decision-making in the education sector.

Learning and Educational Achievement in Paksitan Schools (LEAPS)

With 20+ years of high-impact education research, LEAPS is the largest body of education research in Pakistan and one of the largest in any low-income country.

I was involved in the latest round of LEAPS, and contributed significantly towards tracking and tagging students of the panel study, deploying the latest round of questionnaires to measure cognitive and non-cognitive skills of the sample, building culturally sensitive teams for qualitative and quantitative data analysis, stakeholder management, and research design to answer key education and labor market questions.

Designed and worked on data collection and methodology on a series of off-shoot studies including the education financing project where I contributed to key elements of project design from inception to execution: developed and tested the screener surveys, assembled baseline, midline and endline datasets, provided analytical and field support to a complex RCT to measure the impact of removing credit constraints and providing education support services to private and public schools resulting in this working paper which demonstrates how financial and educational input constraints can significantly affect school survival while underscoring that the fungibility of entrepreneurial support matter.

State Authority in Pakistan

This published paper , titled “Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan” (published in the Journal of Political Economy, 2020), is an empirical economics paper that combines field experiments, lab-in-the-field games, and survey data to study how information affects trust and behavior toward state versus non-state institutions.

I developed and trained the first in-house field team at CERP, contributed to the key elements of research design and analysis, while acting as a primary point of contact between survey teams, government institutions, and tech companies.

🛠️ SKILLS:

Technical Skills:

Statistical Analysis: Stata, Minitab SPSS R, E-Views,Python
Scripting & Data Querying Languages: Python, SQL, Cypher, SPSS, Alteryx
Data Visualization: Tableau, Power BI, Neo4j
Data Collection: ODK, Survey CTO, Survey Solutions
Version Control: Github, Visual Studio Code
Office Suites: Microsoft Office and Google Workspace
Artificial Intelligence: OpenAI playground, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini, Dall-E, Copilot, Jasper, Midjourney, n8n & others.
Languages: English (native), Urdu and Punjabi (proficient), Spanish (intermediate), French (passive), and Arabic (basic).

Areas of Expertise:

Program Design and Project Management,
Change Management, Stakeholder Facilitation,
Strategic Alignment,
Organizational Development,
Executive Communication,
Advanced Analysis,
Fund Raising and Donor Engagement,
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (M&E),
Impact Evaluation & Field Coordination,
Development Economics, and
Data pipeline architecture

🎯 Other Interests

Longboarding
Music
Traveling
Freestyle Football
Squash
Table Tennis
Chess

Last updated: May 2026