Nicholas Burnett is a Principal and Managing Director at R4D, leading our Education group. He comes to us after serving as Assistant Director-General for Education at the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO), responsible for its education work at its Paris headquarters, in four regional bureaus, in over 50 country offices and at 8 institutes and centers, with an annual budget of some $100 million and approximately 400 staff worldwide. He is also a member of the Advisory Panel for the Hewlett and Gates Foundations Program on Quality Education in Developing Countries, of the Board of the Center for International Cooperation in Education in Moscow, of the Council of Consultant Fellows of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning in Paris, and is Special Professor of International Education Policy at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Burnett joined R4D after a distinguished career including UNESCO, the World Bank, the British government and his own consulting firm. At UNESCO, before becoming ADG, he was Director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, an independent team responsible for monitoring progress toward the EFA goals and the education Millennium Development Goals. At the World Bank, where he worked for 20 years, particularly on Africa and on the Caribbean, he was responsible for the Bank’s education policy paper in 1995 and managed its education, health and social protection work in 16 countries in West and Central Africa from 1997-2000 with a portfolio of about $2 billion. While a consultant he helped set up the Roma Education Fund in 2003-04. Early in his career he was an Economic Adviser at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He was educated as an economist at Oxford (BA), Harvard (Henry Fellow) and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (MA, Ph D).