Accelerating Development Solutions via Learning during COVID-19
SDGs and Closing the Skills Gap Learning is key to solving development challenges and to meeting the World Bank Group’s twin goals of ending poverty and building shared prosperity. Whether it is food security or pandemic outbreaks, development progress is often challenged by multiple interdependent factors. Mitigating these factors requires change that can be harnessed through continuous learning. Such capacity building plays a crucial role of capacity building in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and is the process by which individuals and organizations enhance their skills set, knowledge, and experiences to improve job performance and effectively respond to the new challenges from climate, fragility and so on. Achieving the SDGs is particularly challenging in sub-Saharan Africa because many countries face dual challenges: adapting to climate change, and building institutional frameworks that respond to fragility, conflict, and violence. By providing dynamic learning opportunities where diverse audiences can learn at their own pace and access the knowledge they need, the World Bank’s learning ecosystem, the Open Learning Campus equips individuals with the knowledge and leadership capabilities to tackle the toughest development challenges. The WBG focuses on how improved learning, achieved through greater collaboration and new tools such as the Open Learning Campus, leads to more effective development at a global scale.
Sheila Jagannathan is the Head, Open Learning Campus at the World Bank in Washington DC. She serves as the organization’s focal point on digital learning and issues at the intersection of technology use and education in emerging countries. She is a forward-thinking senior education leader with over 35 years of experience in leading capacity building, 
knowledge management, data, social learning and transformation change across public and private organizations. She has been responsible for designing and implementing world-class solutions in challenging global environments, resulting in performance and productivity improvements. Sheila also provides policy advice and technical assistance to World Bank country-level capacity building programs (both government and training institutes seeking to introduce technologies in their educational systems) in, East Asia, China, the Middle East and North Africa, Africa and South Asia. Her current areas of interest and activity include: corporate talent management, diversity & inclusion, organizational development, enterprise learning functions, MOOCs, experiential pedagogy, online/hybrid strategies, development of rich multimodal and social learning environments, virtual and mixed reality, immersive learning, use of artificial education in education, big data and learning analytics, LMS and learning ecosystems. She is on the advisory board and planning committees of major professional associations of learning such as the Canadian Foreign Service Institute, Global Distance Learning Network, E-learning Africa, (Annual International Conference for developing E-learning capacities in Africa), International Conference on e-learning (ICEL), Skills Development Councils.
