Malarvizhi (“Malar”) Veerappan

Malar is a Program Manager and Senior Data Scientist at the World Bank. More recently she served as the report manager of the 2021 World Development Report – Data for Better Lives. She oversees data governance, data management and technology implementations for many development data initiatives. She works with countries and other organizations to find solutions that use data and technology to solve development problems. 

She has led large scale data initiatives with a focus on building data systems that have global reach and impact. As part of these efforts, spearheaded the modernization of the World Bank’s statistical data management and dissemination systems and processes, supporting the production of key data products such as the World Development Indicators, data.worldbank.org, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and the Bank’s data catalog. She was part of the task team that launched The World Bank's Open Data Initiative in 2010 and during this time, she created the World Bank’s first comprehensive data APIs. 

She was part of the team that was instrumental in creating the World Bank’s first Data Council, the data governance body set up to prioritize the institution's key data priorities. As part of this work, she created the Bank’s data management architecture and established the Development Data Hub, the Bank’s first integrated data hub, that streamlines data sharing and helps eliminate data silos by provisioning consistent tools, policies and data curation teams.  She is co-leading efforts to make the evidence on gender data gaps more accessible, usable and salient through compelling narratives and data visualizations. She represents the Bank in several inter-agency data working groups and partnership programs. 

She is an engineer by education and is pursuing an advanced degree in Applied Data Sciences.