Priyadarshani Joshi joined the team in 2014. Her background is in education policy, economics, and public policy - she has a PhD in Education Policy from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in Public Administration (Economic Policy) from Princeton University, and an undergraduate degree in Economics and Chemistry from Amherst College.
In the team, she leads and contributes on non-state actors in education and the role of education in other development outcomes, such as gender equality and inclusive cities. She has previously held research positions at the IMF (Research Officer, Western Hemisphere Department) where she coordinated the Regional Economic Outlook and focused on social policy analysis. She has done consultancies at UNICEF (Social Protection Team) and the World Bank (Human Development Network). Priya also initiated, co-designed and was part of the board of an innovative mobile library project in Nepal, one of the World Bank Development Marketplace 2003 Education Sector Project winners.
Her personal research, building on her dissertation, focuses on the system wide consequences of private school growth for the education system, using perspectives from the public schools, parents and private schools. She is also interested in improving the methodology and data strategies to better analyse choice and competition at a local level, especially in lower income countries. Her single-authored papers have been published in the Comparative Education Review, Compare, International Journal of Educational Development, Prospects and the European Journal of Education.