Dr. Nicholas Burnett

Managing Director of Global Education, Results for Development Institute (R4D)


United States of America

Dr. Nicholas Burnett leads the global education portfolio at Results for Development Institute (R4D), which addresses tough challenges in the field of global education that are often neglected by using combinations of analysis, financing, model identification and connecting key stakeholders. Focus areas include out of school children (OOSC), innovations in education, education finance and innovative finance, the linkage between secondary education and skills for employment, and early childhood education.

R4D has since 2013 worked with the Education Above All Foundation, UNESCO Bangkok and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics on a variety of aspects of the global OOSC challenge. In partnership with Universalia Management Group, R4D has also recently completed an external evaluation of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

Dr. Burnett joined R4D in 2010 after serving as Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO (2007-09), as Director of the independent Education for All Global Monitoring Report (2004-07), and previously as a World Bank manager and staff member. At the Bank, where he worked for 20 years, he was responsible for its education policy paper in 1995 and managed its education, health and social protection work in 16 countries in West and Central Africa. He helped set up the Roma Education Fund in 2004. Dr. Burnett was educated at Oxford, Harvard and the Johns Hopkins universities; is a visiting special professor at Nottingham University in the UK; and was also in 2014-15 a visiting professor at the Center for International Cooperation in Education at Hiroshima University in Japan.