A Multidisciplinary Perspective

A 2018 World Bank report found that while many developing countries have placed more children in classrooms, about half the students aren’t learning anything. “There’s a learning crisis, and our job is to address that crisis,” says Keiko Miwa, director of Education Global Practice for the World Bank. 

Miwa, a Ph.D. in educational policy and administration, says her UAlbany professors “inspired me to work in this area.” The education, public-policy, and business classes she took provided a multidisciplinary perspective that allows her to “think about issues from multiple points of view.” 

A native of Japan, Miwa enrolled at UAlbany after working for three years on a UNICEF education project in Maldives. There, she met UAlbany professors and project consultants Douglas Windham and Francis Kemmerer. When she mentioned that Harvard and Columbia had accepted her into doctoral programs but had not offered financial assistance, Kemmerer and Windham encouraged her to apply to UAlbany. Miwa was admitted with a graduate assistantship.

After two years of coursework, she completed a qualitative dissertation. Miwa did 250 interviews and spent a year in participant observation in Bangladesh, studying how the government works with NGOs to educate poor child laborers. Faculty eased the “really tough” doctoral process. Distinguished Professor Daniel Levy, a political scientist and her dissertation-committee chair, spent considerable time responding to her writing. “I would send him written material, then he would send back more than I had sent,” notes Miwa, who admired Levy’s “unbeatable” commitment to students. 

Since her acceptance into the World Bank’s Young Professional program, Miwa has served as education specialist in Afghanistan, reconstructing the war-torn nation’s educational system after the Taliban’s fall; senior education specialist for Eastern Europe; and assistant to the World Bank president. In 2010, she went to Laos as country manager to focus on educational programs and oversee “various development projects.” 

Promoted to her current position last year, Miwa now oversees more than 150 education projects in more than 80 countries.