Shanti Jagannathan is Principal Education Specialist in the Sustainable Development and Climate Change Department of Asian Development Bank. She works on ADB education sector policies and strategies and provides technical advice to ADB’s lending and non-lending education operations in the Asia and Pacific region.
Shanti has over 25 years of experience with education sector transformation initiatives in school education, technical and vocational education, and training and higher education in Asia. She has led policy research studies on skills for greening economies, Asia’s knowledge-based economies, innovation, and implications of industry 4.0 on education and training, among others. Her recent work includes guidance notes on Education and COVID-19 in Asia and the Pacific, designing hackathons for digital reskilling and upskilling for displaced workers, and co-editing a book on powering a learning society during an age of disruption. She has over a dozen publications from her work in ADB.
Shanti has contributed to international cooperation in education at policy and operational levels and has been on advisory bodies, steering committees, and working groups on education development, gender equality, elimination of child labor, democracy, and human rights, and scholarships for underprivileged students. Prior to ADB, Shanti worked with the European Union as Development Adviser where she developed and implemented programs in health, education, and rural livelihoods in South Asia as a lead task manager. Prior to that, she worked with a think tank, the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.