Poverty reduction at the forefront of development
Punam Chuhan-Pole | 26 November 2025Progress in global poverty reduction has not only led to more ambitious goals, but also to new demands for better data.
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Punam Chuhan-Pole
Punam Chuhan-Pole is Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist of the Africa Region at the World Bank.
She is currently researching issues of growth and poverty reduction in Africa. Her recent work includes development of a semi-annual publication—Africa’s Pulse—which presents recent economic trends and prospects for the region’s economies and analysis of issues shaping Africa’s future, and a study documenting and analyzing recent development progress in Africa—Yes Africa Can: Success Stories from a Dynamic Continent. Punam has also been a member of the core team producing the Global Monitoring Report, a joint World Bank-IMF annual publication.
Her areas of expertise include growth and poverty, mineral governance, aid and development, improving the quality and effectiveness of aid, and the links between donor allocations and recipient policies. She has also worked extensively on monitoring and assessing vulnerability of developing countries to external shocks, analyzing the determinants of private capital flows, and evaluating the debt defaults of the 1980s and 1990s.