Regional Director, Asia and the Pacific Division

Reehana Rifat Raza

Reehana Rifat Raza is Regional Director for the Asia and the Pacific Division at IFAD. She is responsible for the overall management of the Asia Pacific Regions portfolio at IFAD which covers 53 projects in 20 country offices. In a period of unprecedented economic challenges, Raza’s priority is to ensure that IFAD projects in Asia and the Pacific are supporting and protecting the rural poor in the region.

Raza is a development economist with over 20 years of experience in skills and workforce development, social protection, decentralization and service delivery. She has regional experience in South Asia and the Asia Pacific, and Eastern and Southern Africa. Reehana has served as a Senior Economist at The World Bank and a Senior Research Associate at the Urban institute in Washington D.C. USA. She is the Co-Founder, former Director and Fellow of a leading economic think-tank, the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS), in Pakistan. Raza is also a former faculty member of the Department of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and was an adjunct faculty member at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

She holds a Master of Philosophy in Economics and Politics of Development and a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge, UK.