BY SHAMILLA KARA

Sheila Braka Musiime says she likes the fact that what she does is relevant globally and contributes to making people’s lives better. “Fighting poverty is a noble but very challenging mission which requires collaboration among many and very different disciplines such as law, economics, and social development,” she says.

Musiime is a senior legal counsel at the World Bank for the past nine years on country lending operations and policy matters. She works as part of the policy team in the legal department of the World Bank.The department works with the bank management team to prepare new policies, amend existing ones or develop new product lines.

It also aids bank staff in interpreting and applying its policies and procedures, and provides legal support for the bank’s work on fraud and corruption and other tasks related to the legal and policy framework.

The World Bank has its own body of international law, which its staff apply in all their operations, Musiime says.

This body includes the bank’s articles of agreement, its operational policies and procedures, and its staff rules. These form the “law applied” for the World Bank’s operations and are similar to the constitution, statutes, rules and regulations that member countries have for their own citizens and operations.

Her other part of work focuses on the bank’s lending operations. “The bank’s mission of fighting poverty drives the bank’s lending operations and, in fact, drives all its work as an international financial institution,” she says.

There are many facets to the job of a legal counsel at the bank, she adds, but she still finds her job exciting and “important in an organisation that takes the rule of law very seriously.”

Career background
Prior to joining the World Bank, Musiime worked at Shonubi, Musoke & Company Advocates.

“It was an enriching experience and I got valuable insight into the practice of law in Uganda.” She also had internships in various organisations during her vacations while at Makerere University.

Her interest in law and development “My interest in international law and development issues began while at Makerere but peaked while I was doing my masters at Harvard,” recounts Musiime who was the president of the Makerere Law Society in 1997.

“During that time, the society and the Faculty of Law got involved in development issues at the local level, including a school rehabilitation project in Iganga that brings back very fond memories, as well as several collaborations with the University of Pretoria on human rights issues,” she says.

This, she discloses, broadened her mind and got her interested in doing a masters in international law, which exposed her to the workings of the World Bank.

“When the opportunity to join the World Bank came, it seemed like the intersection of law and development was something that I wanted to spend my life doing, and I still feel the same way,” Musiime explains.

What drives her
“A desire to be the best citizen of the world that I can be, a desire to make my parents who have sacrificed so much for me and my siblings proud and a desire to be a good example to my children.”

Professional contribution back home Musiime says she already feels like she is contributing back home “by bringing another voice from Uganda, into the development discussion at the World Bank.”

Musiime hopes that one day, she will return to Uganda to share her experience and contribute to the “already vibrant legal community.”

The kind of person she is at work
Like most lawyers, Musiime says, she tends to put emphasis on the quality of her products. She adds that as a development lawyer, she has to keep focus on the bigger picture, that is, what her legal work contributes to eradicating a specific facet of poverty.
skara@newvision.co.ug