RA (Rob) Swinkels

Rob Swinkels is currently Team Leader of the International Policy Team at Wageningen Social and Economic Research. He is a development economist with more than 25 years of experience, most of it with the World Bank. He has lived and worked across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. He earlier served for three years as the World Bank's Lead Economist and Program Leader in Abidjan, where he oversaw the World Bank’s policy research and policy-based lending program to promote inclusive growth in Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Togo, and Guinea. Before that, Rob held senior roles with the World Bank while living and working in Tanzania and Vietnam, and he has led applied micro-economic policy research initiatives in Zimbabwe, Cabo Verde, and several countries in Europe and Central Asia. He has also worked with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he was in charge of Results Measurement of Dutch aid and with SNV as a policy analysis advisor to the Ministy of Agriculture in Bhutan. He started his career as a farming systems economist with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) based in West-Kenya. Rob speaks multiple languages, including Dutch, English French, Portuguese, Swahili, and conversational Spanish and Thai. A Dutch national, he is married and has four children. Outside of work, he enjoys road cycling, swimming, tennis, hiking, and ecological gardening.