Robert Liebenthal is a development economist and manager with 36 years of management and field experience covering Africa, Europe and Central Asia, as well as global and institutional policy issues. From 1975 to 2002, he worked at the World Bank, where he held various professional and management positions. Highlights of his career at the Bank included: Co-authorship of the 1981 World Development Report, Chief of the Bank’s policy analysis and review division, Leadership of the World Bank’s programs on education, health and social protection in the former Soviet Union, Representative of the Bank in Malawi. Leadership of Bank internal task forces on staff training and communications. Since retiring from the Bank and moving back to Zambia, he has worked as a consultant for the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the African Development Bank, GTZ (the German technical assistance agency), the Zambian Government and the World Bank. He has served on the board of African Life Financial Services Ltd and Zambia Analysis, a magazine on economics and business in Zambia. He was co-editor of the book, Attacking Poverty in Africa, a collection of case studies for the Beijing Conference on Poverty in 2006. From 2009 to 2011, he was National Coordinator for the Millennium Challenge Account - Zambia, a unit under the Ministry of Finance and National Planning responsible for preparing Zambia's proposed investment programme for support by the Millennium Change Corporation. He is currently Vice-President of the Economics Association of Zambia. He was educated at Oxford University, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and took his B. Phil (Masters) in Economics. He came to Zambia in 1968 as Overseas Decvelopment Institute (ODI) Fellow at the Ministry of Agriculture. He was director of research at the Bank of Zambia in 1973-74, and research officer at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University in the UK in 1974-75.