5. Deepa Narayan

For seeing the poor as more than victims, Deepa Narayan has been ranked 79 in the list. The former director of a World Bank anti-poverty programme, she has spent nearly 30 years working for NGOs, governments, and global organisations in Asia and Africa.

She is a senior advisor in the poverty reduction and economic management network of the World Bank.  She is currently director of a 17 country study entitled Moving out of Poverty: Understanding Freedom, Democracy and Growth from the Bottom Up, which explores how people move out of poverty permanently, from the perspectives of men and women who have experienced it first-hand.  A follow up study to Voices of the Poor, the study seeks to inform policies that can make shared growth a reality.