Sourovi De

Sourovi De leads OPM’s Education practice. She focusses on primary and secondary grade learning assessments, teacher development, early childhood development, school quality, education technology, maternal and child health, and water and sanitation.

Sourovi leads the monitoring, evidence and learning workstream of the FCDO-funded Sierra Leone Secondary Education Improvement Programme. In this role, Sourovi provides evidence-based technical assistance to senior ministerial officials in the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE), senior education advisors at FCDO and implementing agencies. Sourovi’s recent work includes:

• Advising the ministry’s senior leadership team, including the minister, on building organisational capabilities for the establishment of a Sierra Leone national learning assessment and research unit;
• Leading and managing the strategy development process of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) to restructure its training offering to mid-/senior-level civil servants in ministries of education;
• Leading the impact evaluation of a FCDO teacher development programme in northern Nigeria based on use of education technology: evaluated the pilot using randomised controlled-trial and recommended modalities for scaling up;
• Advising and contributing to the FCDO business case for designing a new basic education improvement programme in Uganda;
• Managing and analysing a quantitative baseline assessment of public and private-sector providers of preschools / early childhood education in remote districts of Timor-Leste for UNICEF; and
• Managing a two-year global research programme on early childhood development, funded by 3ie.

Sourovi holds a BA in Economics from the University of Delhi, and an MSc in Development Economics from the University of Oxford.