Daisy Demirag is a Social Protection Specialist at the World Bank Group in Ethiopia and a dual-career PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT and Maastricht University.
She is currently working for the World Bank on Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme, the largest safety net program in sub-Saharan Africa, as technical team lead on the monitoring and evaluation/systems agenda, and helped start-up and roll-out the first Urban Productive Safety Net Programme in Africa. Prior to working in Ethiopia, Daisy worked with UNICEF in Ghana to support government operations on the LEAP cash transfer programme, as well as to develop an integrated social protection system and conducted analytical research on Ghana’s social protection sector. She has worked for various UN agencies as well as the private sector across South and Southeast Asia, and Africa.
Daisy’s research interests include understanding the effects of social protection on occupational choices, migration and family dynamics. Her PhD research is focused on understanding the effect of different types of safety net transfers on labour migration/mobility and the consequences on intra-household dynamics on different outcomes of interest as a result of changes to information sharing in low-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa.
Daisy holds a B. Commerce and B. Arts (summa cum laude) in Economics from McMaster University in Canada, as well as a MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics in the UK. She is married with two children and currently based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.