Anna is the Country Engagement Lead for the Global Partnership for Education
Anna Seeger, EMPA (second from right) with fellow colleagues from the Global Partnership for Education.
I joined the EMPA after several years of working in international development with a bilateral donor and the United Nations. The main purpose of joining was to sharpen my policy analysis skills, hoping to equip myself to better guide governments on complex education policy decisions.
At the beginning of the course, I was highly motivated but also unsure about managing the course requirements alongside my role in supporting a war-torn nation in bridging political divides to secure continued education and safety. However, I soon realized that the in-person sessions held on the LSE campus were very energizing and even improved my ability to structure my work. The week-long residencies provided ample opportunities to engage with LSE’s finest lecturers and well-known practitioners (I vividly remember Duncan Green).
Equally important were the exchanges and the learning with and from my peers – a group of fun and knowledgeable individuals with a diverse range of public and private sector backgrounds. The readings and particularly the essays that had to be written (mostly on planes and in airports) helped me to integrate theoretical concepts into real-world scenarios.
My work since then has frequently connected with topics from the EMPA. While living in the Pacific, the theory of market dynamics in geographically dispersed economies became more than a textbook concept, and devising strategies for managing externalities such as climate change became a daily reality. And while my entire career until then had evolved around financing, sustaining and delivering public goods, the Pacific allowed me to contribute to regional efforts in which fifteen island states and territories have joined forces to share resources, develop and finance collectively policies, strategies and tools to address sticky policy challenges one country alone cannot solve. Unforgettable will also be my encounters and learning from the extraordinary Pacific scholars on culture and identity.
Most recently, I joined the world’s largest fund and partnership focused on providing quality education to children in nearly ninety lower-income countries. Hosted at the World Bank, this position allows me to rethink how we finance education for the long haul and push for more innovative, sustainable models—work that feels straight out of the EMPA’s Global Economy module. It’s a fresh chapter, unfolding against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and shifting political winds, where existing playbooks may need some bold new edits.
It’s been 7 years since graduation – a date easy to remember as my son was born a few days later – and I still value every single moment of my EMPA journey.