Sreelakshmi Papineni
Senior Economist, Africa Gender Innovation Lab, World Bank
Sreelakshmi Papineni is a Senior Economist at the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL). At GIL she leads the Entrepreneurship and Occupational Sex Segregation thematic areas and co-leads the East Africa Girls Empowerment and Resilience (EAGER) Evidence Hub that generates evidence to support adolescent girls and young women. Her research focuses on gender, social norms, and impact evaluation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining the World Bank, Sreelakshmi was a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design and Innovations for Poverty Action in the US, Kenya, and India, and an Equity Sales Trader in the UK. She holds a master’s degree from Yale University, and a BSc in Economics at UCL. Sreelakshmi’s website here.
Recent work by Sreelakshmi Papineni
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Cash transfers and agency: What Nigerian couples reveal about household power
In Nigeria, cash transfers to women increase their desire for agency but only when husbands can't see it – revealing the complex interplay between economic empowerment and social norms.
Published 25.11.25