Designation: Analyst

Grace is a skilled educational professional with over 10 years’ experience working with educators to develop innovative and inclusive ways to transform teaching and learning. With her background in marketing and product development, she has developed a firm understanding of how to cultivate and foster strategic partnerships while strengthening knowledge sharing value chains.

Grace is the co-founder of a non-profit, Teach for Africa, an organization whose core mandate is to develop capacity in early childhood educators to enhance their inclusive teaching practices. She spearheaded the design, development and rolling out of a toolkit for best practices in inclusive early childhood education for literacy and numeracy. This experience afforded her a deep understanding of the education eco-system in South Africa and Botswana. She is a lifelong advocate of thoughtful dialogues that embrace diversity and promote inclusion.

Grace holds a Master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Pretoria.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Full list of publications available here.

Anne-Fleur is an analyst at Open Development & Education. She has worked as a secondary school teacher in the Netherlands, where she taught English and Global Citizenship. She has also worked with refugee students and teachers on participatory approaches in designing education materials and platforms for refugee and migrant contexts. She has worked as a researcher on issues related to sustainable partnerships and relationships between small-scale NGOs, their partners, and their beneficiaries in Asia and East Africa. She has an MA from the University of Groningen in English Language and Culture, and an MSc. in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies from the University of Leuven. Currently, she focuses on mixed methods and participatory research for education policy in education in emergencies.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Full list of publications available here.

Gemma Bennett is a psychologist with a specific interest in education, particularly for children with social, emotional and mental health issues. She is also interested in gender and ethnicity. At Open Development & Education, Gemma is responsible for research and quality assurance. Gemma is currently seconded from OpenDevEd to undertake a doctorate in educational psychology.

Ghislaine is an international development professional, passionate and curious about the usage of technology and AI to improve education and learning outcomes at all levels of education. She holds a Masters in Development Economics and International Project Management. She is currently supporting work with the Commonwealth of Learning at ODE. Prior to her career shift to Edtech, she previously worked on several programmes in emergency education, TVET, gender, and participatory development  with UNESCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and the Ministry of Environment of Cameroon. She is currently doing a Masters in Smart Edtech, Co-creativity and Digital tools for Educational Innovation. Her goal is to help individuals to learn better and help policy makers and governments create more tech friendly policies for education and digitalization

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Full list of publications available here.

Xuzel Ana Villavicencio Peralta is a research analyst at Open Development and Education. In 2020, she completed her MSc in ICTs for Development at the University of Manchester. Her project management and technical experience includes leading the Improving Learning through Classroom Experience (ILCE) programme in Tanzania and developing a safe education sector plan for the Caribbean member states. Through the EdTech Hub helpdesk, she also supported UNICEF El Salvador and Argentina in mapping international experiences focused on hybrid learning and STEM for girls, respectively.

Prior to joining OpenDevEd, Xuzel worked on designing social media strategies to raise awareness of the importance of teaching IT and digital skills to children living in vulnerable conditions. Her main interest is promoting better use of technology in  education, with a focus on children and young people in developing countries who have limited access to it.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Full list of publications available here.

Thaer is an analyst at Open Development & Education and the EdTech Hub. He is currently also a PhD candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Thaer completed an MPhil in 2019 and an MA in 2017 at the same department, and he also holds a BS in Applied Physics from Columbia University.

Thaer is also completing his PhD at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University (estimated date of completion: May, 2023). Thaer’s PhD dissertation asks how class and capital may be retheorized as performative effects in the context of the colonization of southeastern Syria in the late Ottoman era and the subsequent British colonization, and establishment, of (Trans)Jordan. Related areas of interest include premodern moral cosmologies, the relationship between technologies of colonization and technologies of capitalization, economic theology, and the multiple modalities of ideology’s material existence.

At OpenDevEd, Thaer has worked on a range of topic areas, including distance learning strategies, engagement strategies, girls’ education, community mobilisation, feasibility assessments, and resource mapping.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Full list of publications here