Larisa Leshchenko has been the World Bank’s Country Manager for Liberia since August 2016. Before this, she worked as Country Manager for Azerbaijan, Country Program Coordinator for the South Caucasus, and a Senior Country Officer for Southern Africa and Nigeria. As such, she led teams on the development of Country Partnership Strategies. Until 2005, as a Senior Economist on Ukraine, she was engaged in dialogue on public finance management and other areas of expertise.

Prior to joining the Bank in 1996, Leshchenko had been a research fellow at the Central European University in Prague, and also separately, at Oxford University; and a research associate at the Institute of Cybernetics, and Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Ukraine. Leshchenko has MAs (or the equivalent) from Kiev National University and New York State (University), and is the author or co-author of a number of Bank publications and more than 15 research papers. She holds a Ph.D. in operations research, specializing in stochastic optimization.