Rachel is a Senior Education and Social Development Adviser at the FCDO (the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office of the UK government) and Visiting Fellow of Policy and Practice at the Blavatnik School. Her work focuses on systems strengthening and the effective delivery of equity in global education.

At FCDO, she has grown a portfolio of education research, with programmes including the research on improving systems of education (RISE), on education technology (EdTech), and delivery approaches (DeliverEd). She co-designed the joint World Bank, FCDO, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation What Works Hub for Global Education, including work with the BETER group to coordinate efforts to collect data on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on education. She currently serves on the Secretariat for the Global Evidence Education Advisory Panel, which documents best practice of ‘what works’ to combat the global learning crisis. In 2014, she established the Building Evidence in Education global group with the World Bank, USAID, and the UN, to improve standards of research in the sector, catalyse co-ordination of financial resources, and build capacity for cost effectiveness analysis.

When working for the UK Government Department for International Development Ghana she chaired the Local Education Group and initiated a public-private partnership with government to scale complementary basic education to out of school children, along with girls’ education initiatives that have focused on learning gains for the most marginalised.

Alongside her work on policy, Rachel has led new initiatives in academia. As a lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (1996-2000), she established courses on refugees and South Asia and pioneered the Lacuna visual anthropology initiative. In Kenya, she taught gender relations at Kenyatta University, Nairobi (1997). Her doctoral ethnographic research at the University of Cambridge - with the Bhutanese in the Beldangi refugee camp in Nepal led to work with UNHCR for the PARinAC initiative, and further research grants for work on child labour in Nepal and India with ILO and ESCOR.

Rachel serves on STIR Education’s Global Council and she was an Advisory Member for the Brookings Institution Scaling Initiative and sits on the World Bank’s Foundational Learning Trust Fund Council. Her research interests include equity in education, social protection, and service delivery.