"There are probably lots of people who could do this job that are perhaps better qualified or more experienced than me, but I am not quite sure there was anyone that wanted it quite as much," says World Bank's group general counsel Dr Sandie Okoro.

Okoro, who joined the World Bank in February, has held a variety of senior roles in the past, including stints as GC at HSBC Global Asset Management and Barings, but it is fair to say none have piqued her interest in the same way as her current position.

She explains that this is because none of her past roles have allowed her to combine her legal experience with her passion for helping others, to the same extent.

At HSBC, she was the the only black female bank GC in the City, and her experience setting up programmes and mentoring opportunities for ethnic minority law students helped earn her an honorary doctorate from City University.

"This is going to sound trite, but it is true – I always wanted to do something that makes the world a better place," says Okoro. "I kind of did some of that in my spare time, but the fact that I can now do something that I love as my day job and get paid for it is extraordinary."

The World Bank, which has a stated goal of helping to find sustainable solutions to reduce poverty and build prosperity in developing countries, is split into five institutions, with the legal team (known internally as the legal vice-presidency unit) working across all of them.

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Agency (IDA) provide financing, policy advice and technical assistance directly to the governments of developing countries, while the other three parts offer advice and technical assistance to private companies in developing countries.

Okoro, who relocated from London to Washington DC at the beginning of the year to work from the World Bank's headquarters, now manages the bank's 180-strong team of lawyers, who spend 75% of their time negotiating loans, guarantees and grants directly with governments.

While most of the legal team are in Washington, 20 of the bank's 130 lawyers are split across 14 developing countries.

Described by Okoro as the bank's "decentralised lawyers", they work in locations such as Latin America, South Asia, India and Kazakhstan, with one lawyer splitting their time between Dubai and Afghanistan, where Okoro is keen to visit.

"I want to visit all my decentralised lawyers in my first 18 months at the bank, and Afghanistan is an important place for me to go because we have a lot of projects there," she says.

She has just returned from a two-week mission to Southeast Asia to see first-hand how the World Bank impacts the countries it loans to.

The trips give her the chance to meet some of legal team doing what she terms the "real hard-hat lawyering"; working on the ground, facilitating the projects and doing the negotiations.

On her latest trip she visited Jakarta, Bangkok and Hanoi. Although she concedes that her favourite projects tend to be those with people at their centre, such as loans for schools in developing countries, the bank is involved in a raft of larger-scale infrastructure projects too.

"I had never heard of a lava dam before. There is a large volcano on Java that erupted a few years ago, which destroyed much of the housing in its path. With World Bank funds they have built a dam so that the next time it erupts, it will move the lava flow through this dam. Isn't that clever?" exclaims Okoro.

Okoro also spends time meeting government officials on these trips. Most recently, in Vietnam she met the attorney general and minister of finance for the country.

Talking about the shift in approach needed to deal with these officials, Okoro says: "When you are talking to the attorney general, they are representing their country and the country's needs, wants and development goals; whereas when you are talking to a general counsel, they are in a microcosm – they are only dealing with their institution. The attorney general is dealing with everything.

"So it's a very different type of interaction and mindset, which is really fascinating because you make the shift from dealing with things at a micro level to a macro level, and I am still getting used to that."

It's not the only change she's getting used to. Many of the articles used by the lawyers date back to the World Bank's formation in 1944, and she is also getting used to the bank's own rules and regulations. Okoro says: "My secret academic is coming out, which is no bad thing."

"In many ways, the lawyering is very sophisticated. I have made the leap from regulation in a heavily regulated environment to another type of heavily regulated environment, but in a very different way – things like international law and treaty law. It has been a big mind expansion."

Alongside all of this, Okoro and her team also advise on more standard in-house issues such as personnel issues and financial transactions; not to mention creating financing facilities for refugees, pandemics and helping to fight fraud and corruption.

Top of her immediate list of priorities for her team is to modernise its structure. She has yet to finalise her plans but wants the team to take a more risk-based approach to lawyering – identifying and advising legal risks to protect the organisation.

Okoro jokes: "We have this global scope, so if you sneeze, the whole world catches a cold. Therefore you make sure that you don't sneeze too many times."

Her next 18 months look busy, packed with missions to development projects, meeting the rest of her lawyers and rethinking how the team operates globally. However, the job is clearly one she relishes.

"I got a sense of worth in other roles, but it is a different one now. I think at [this] stage in my career – when you want to give something back – it is such a fabulous job and a fabulous opportunity to get involved in something so important. To think this is my day job is amazing."

Sandie Okoro career history:

1991-2007 – Schroders (becoming head of legal in 2003) 2007-14 – Global general counsel, Barings 2014-17 – Global general counsel, HSBC Global Asset Management and deputy general counsel of HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management 2017 – Group general counsel, World Bank