Sabine Bernabè is Vice President and Director-General of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), World Bank Group, since 2023.  

Sabine leads IEG at a critical juncture for the World Bank Group (WBG), holding it accountable for the implementation of the Evolution Roadmap and helping it learn throughout the process to inform course correction and enhance the effectiveness of the WBG activities in the future.

Sabine’s vision for IEG is to deliver on this challenge by producing useful, high quality, independent evaluations that enhance the WBG accountability and provide evidence-based lessons for better results, and decision-making. Close engagement with WBG Management, the Board and country partners is critical to achieve this. Her priorities include scaling up and more systematically mining existing evaluative evidence of what works and what doesn’t and making it easily accessible to all stakeholders, as well as drawing on a variety of methods and data to assess the impact of WBG operations. Critical to her vision is also the role of evaluation in capacity development for client countries through the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), of which IEG is a partner, and through closer engagement with country partners on the findings of evaluations.

Sabine has over 20 years’ international development experience in evaluation, policy, and research across several International Organizations and academia. Before leading IEG, Sabine led the Evaluation Function of the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group. She fostered knowledge management and strengthened the function’s analytical skills, promoted evaluation-based dialogue and exchanges with Management and the Board on issues of critical importance to the EIB Group and fostered collaborative relationships with heads of evaluation of other international organizations.

Previously Sabine worked as an economist for the World Bank, the EIB, UNDP and the University of K.U. Leuven. She also worked, taught and published on a range of topics including poverty, inequality, labor markets, growth and financial sector development. 

Sabine earned a Ph. D from the London School of Economics and a Masters from SDA Bocconi.