Marelize Gorgens

Marelize leads a global program on Innovations in Health and Human Development at the World Bank. The aim of this effort is to solve pernicious human development challenges – exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic -- in low- and middle-income countries. With an academic background in engineering, mathematical modelling, public health, and health analytics, she started her career in the private sector as a director at a management consulting firm before changing gears; she worked as a monitoring and evaluation officer for a Ministry of Education in a low-income country. She had a stint as an entrepreneur in the health analytics space and worked with several non-governmental organizations, and in academia, before joining the World Bank. A teacher at heart, she has both global strategy and practical experience in working with low- and middle-income countries and non-for-profit organizations to find challenges and address them through a pragmatic and innovative mix of data, technology, policy, capacity, implementation know-how, and evaluation for. She has an extensive academic and non-fiction publication record, and is on the editorial board of two journals (Global Health Science and Practice, and Oxford Digital Health).