Elena Ruiz Abril is the Regional Policy Advisor for Women’s Economic Empowerment in UN Women’s Regional office for West and Central Africa. She is a gender specialist with degrees in Economics and Gender Analysis of Development and more than 20 years of experience working for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Prior to joining UN Women WCRO, she worked for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and several UN agencies in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa. She has spent most of her career working on women’s economic empowerment conducting policy analysis, dialogue and reform, advising public and private sector institutions, and supporting advocacy and programmatic work to improve women’s access to economic opportunities, and to strengthen women’s economic rights. In her recent work at EBRD, she spearheaded the IFI’s work on gender responsive investment climate reform, and was instrumental in the design of the Bank’s flagship Women in Business Program to support women entrepreneurs’ access to bank finance in 19 countries. She also led the Bank’s efforts to remove legal barriers to women’s participation in the labor market in Central Asia.