Karin Schelzig

Director, Human and Social Development, ADB Sectors Group

Karin is a poverty and social protection specialist with more than 22 years of experience leading social policy dialogue and development program design and implementation with governments and civil society in East and Southeast Asia. She has focused on social assistance and cash transfers, multidimensional poverty analysis and poverty targeting, the graduation approach and cash plus programming, early childhood and basic education, technical and vocational education and training, community-driven development, and gender analysis and women’s economic empowerment. Based at the ADB resident mission in Beijing since 2019, Karin is supporting social assistance reforms, social service delivery, and healthy and age-friendly cities in People's Republic of China, and shock-responsive social protection and inclusive education in Mongolia. In her previous assignment at ADB headquarters in Manila, she covered social protection and education in Indonesia, Lao PDR, and the Philippines. She also spent five years as a social sector specialist at the resident mission in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Prior to joining ADB in 2004, Karin’s work as a poverty specialist with Development Alternatives, Inc. in Washington, D.C. included a long-term assignment in Kiev, Ukraine. She completed a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics in 1999 with a dissertation on measuring multidimensional poverty in the Philippines.

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Pantawid Pamilya: Money for Nothing?

More than 4.4 million poor Filipino families receive regular cash grants from the government to help them make ends meet.  But they aren’t getting money for nothing—there is a catch: families only get the cash if their children go to school and get regular health check-ups, and if the parents go to family development sessions every month. 

Karin Schelzig

I See Dead People

I see dead people. No, I don’t mean ghosts like the ones a young Haley Joel Osment could see in the 1999 hit film The Sixth Sense. I mean actual dead bodies. I see them all the time, victims of the seemingly lawless and definitely dangerous free-for-all that is driving on Cambodia’s national roads.

Karin Schelzig