The members of our Board offer strategic input while providing oversight and accountability to ensure the successful achievement of ODW’s mission. We are pleased to rely on the extensive experience that each one brings in the areas of official statistics, international development, and transparency.
Misha Belkindas
Dr. Misha V. Belkindas is President of International Association of Official Statistics. He is the Managing Director of ODW Consulting with over four decades of experience in practical and operational statistical capacity building, both internationally and with national governments. He is also a co-founder of Open Data Watch and serves as a member of its board. Prior to this, as manager of the World Bank Development Data Group, he was responsible for the World Bank’s lending programs for statistical capacity building and for the partnership programs with national statistical offices, international institutions and donors. He is an elected member of International Statistical Institute, Royal Statistical Society, American Statistical Association, and numerous other organizations. He holds a PHD in Mathematical Economics and is an Honorary Doctor of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
Mayra Buvinic
Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognized expert on gender and development and social development, is a Senior Fellow with Data2X and the Center for Global Development. Previously, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) where she headed the Social Development Division and was founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women. She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jessica Espey
Jessica Espey is a Lecturer in the School of Geographic Sciences at University of Bristol. Jessica’s research is focused on the international governance of sustainable development. She teaches the MSc in Global Development and Environment and other modules across the department including geographies of colonialism and urban resilience. In 2022 Jessica completed her PhD which focused on the use of science within multilateral policymaking, with a particular focus on the 2012-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) negotiations.
She has more than 16 years professional experience working in international development, within think-tanks, charities and the United Nations. From 2014-2020 she was a Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and prior to that she served as an Adviser to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.
She has written extensively on the governance of sustainable development, with a particularly focus on monitoring, accountability and data systems. Much of her policy work is available via https://www.sdsntrends.org/. She has further interests in and published work on urbanisation and horizonal and vertical inequalities.
Joel Gurin
Joel Gurin is the President and Founder of CODE and an internationally recognized expert on open data. His book Open Data Now (McGraw-Hill), written for a general audience, is considered a benchmark publication that helped define this emerging field. Before launching CODE in January 2015 he conceptualized and led the development team for the GovLab’s Open Data 500 project, the first thorough study of the use of open government data by the private sector. Joel’s background includes government, journalism, nonprofit leadership, and consumer issues. He served as Chair of the White House Task Force on Smart Disclosure, which studied how open government data can improve consumer markets, and as Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. For more than a decade he was Editorial Director and then Executive Vice President of Consumer Reports, where he directed the launch and development of ConsumerReports.org, the world’s largest paid-subscription information-based website. He is a graduate of Harvard University with an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa.
Josh Powell
Josh Powell is the Chief Executive Officer at Development Gateway: an IREX Venture (DG), overseeing DG’s management team and coordinating strategy and overall organizational performance. Over the past decade, Josh has demonstrated experience and a reputation for excellence in working at all aspects of leadership in data for development, at both programmatic and organizational levels. Through his work on various international multi-stakeholder initiatives and in more than a dozen countries globally, Josh has expertise in bridging the gap between global norms, practices, and standards and country needs, systems, and institutions.
Josh chairs the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data’s (GPSDD’s) Technical Advisory Group (TAG). He sits on the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC’s) Advisory Council, and he serves on the OpenGov Hub Management Team. He previously sat on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Members’ Assembly and TAG.
Josh holds a MS in Public Policy from Brigham Young University and a BS in Finance from the University of Baltimore.
Eric Swanson
Eric is a co-founder of ODW. He supervises the research and analytical work of ODW. He was previously program manager and senior adviser in the World Bank’s Development Data Group with responsibilities including the World Development Indicators. He holds a PhD in economics. He has previously worked on topics of measuring educational achievement, economic modeling and forecasting, and jury selection.
Shaida Badiee
Shaida directs the strategic planning, partnership, and fund-raising work of ODW. She is a Senior Advisor to Data2X focused on gender data, co-chairs the SDSN TReNDS group, is part of Technical Advisory Group for GPSDD, and is a member of the PARIS21 board and a number of others. Before co-founding ODW in 2013, she worked at the World Bank for 36 years and was the Director of the Development Data Group for many years. She holds an MS degree in Engineering, specialized in information management..
Lisa Bersales
Dr. Lisa Grace S. Bersales, Professor of Statistics at the University of the Philippines’ School of Statistics, was a founding Board member of ODW. She was the first National Statistician of the Philippines and served in this capacity from April 2014 to April 2019, heading the Philippine Statistics Authority. During this period, she was also the Philippines’ Civil Registrar General and started the implementation of the Philippines’ national identification system. She implemented the Philippine Statistical Act of 2013 in the creation of the Philippine Statistics Authority. Under her term, the Population Census of 2015 was conducted, ISO 9001:2015 certification of all processes of the agency was earned for 2017 and 2018, Public Private Partnership for developing an updated Civil Registration Information Technology infrastructure was signed for a period of 12 years, open data platform was created in the agency website, several statistical methodologies were developed. Examples are : several environment accounts, multidimensional poverty index, sustainable tourism statistics. She also served as co-chair of the IAEG for Sustainable Goals Indicators , vice-chair of the Regional Steering Group for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Decade for Asia and the Pacific, chair of the Advisory Council to the UN Statistical Institute for Asia and the Pacific, chair of the executive committee of PARIS21. She is currently President of the Philippines’ professional society of statisticians, the Philippine Statistical Association, Inc
Martine Durand
Martine Durand, a founding Board member of ODW, was Director of Statistics and Chief Statistician of the OECD with responsibility for providing strategic orientation for the Organization’s statistical policy and oversight of all OECD’s statistical activities. She was formerly Deputy-Director of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs where she was responsible for OECD’s work on employment and training policies, social policies, health policies and international migration published in OECD flagship reports such as the OECD International Migration Outlook, the OECD Employment Outlook, Pensions at a Glance and Health at a Glance. She joined the OECD in 1983 as an economist in the Economics Department where she worked on a number of policy issues related inter alia to international competitiveness, oil and commodity markets and labour markets in OECD countries. She later worked on the OECD Economic Surveys of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Jean-Louis Sarbib
Jean-Louis Sarbib, a Distinguished fellow of the Emerging Markets Forum and chair of the G20 Compact with Africa Advisory Panel, was a founding Board member of ODW. From March 2009 to December 2018, he was Chief Executive Officer at Development Gateway, an international nonprofit social enterprise whose mission is to support the use of data, technology, and evidence to create accountable institutions that listen and respond to the needs of their constituents and are efficient in targeting and delivering services that improve lives. From 1980 to 2006, he was at the World Bank where he occupied a number of senior positions: Vice President for Africa, Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa, and Senior Vice President for human development. Upon leaving the Bank and before leading Development Gateway, he joined Wolfensohn & Company, a private equity firm, as a managing director. He was a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and taught at Georgetown University. He serves on a number of non-profit boards and on the board of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the African University of Science and Technology, and the Nelson Mandela Institution. Prior to joining the World Bank, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and worked for the French Government. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso and received a Lifetime Award for Diversity and Inclusion from the World Bank. He received numerous honors from the countries where he worked. He is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (now Mines Paris Tech) and holds a Master in City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.