Ward Heneveld, an expert in education in the developing world, will join the Global Development Program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as a program officer, the program’s director, Smita Singh, announced today.
“I’m so pleased to have Ward join us,” Singh said. “I’m confident that his broad experience and hands-on know-how will further the strategic goals of the Global Development Program.”
Heneveld, who has a PhD in educational planning from Harvard University, will work on the Global Development Program’s efforts to improve the quality of education in the developing world, which the Hewlett Foundation is pursuing in a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“There are organizations with inadequate support that are doing great things to improve education in the developing world,” Heneveld said. “If we can help them, we’ll not only improve the prospects of a lot of people, we’ll also provide some creative examples to improve the whole field. I’m excited to be part of that.”
The Gates Foundation made a grant of $40 million over five years to the Hewlett Foundation to design a strategy and administer grants to improve learning outcomes mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Those regions have the lowest levels of student achievement in the world. The Hewlett Foundation has committed at least an additional $20 million to the work. The work will fund large-scale demonstration projects to develop techniques to improve the quality of education that can be applied elsewhere in the world.
Among Heneveld’s responsibilities as a program officer, he will identify potential grantees and help implement the Program’s overall strategy for improving education in the developing world.
He comes to the Foundation from a stint as a private consultant on a broad range of educational issues, from helping to design distance learning program for teachers in rural Romania to chairing a World Bank review of its assistance to education in Nigeria. For most of the 1990s Heneveld worked as an education expert on the staff at the World Bank.
Earlier in his career, he worked as a secondary school headmaster in Kenya and a teacher trainer in Vermont, as head of the School for International Training, in Brattleboro, Vermont; and as director of education programs at the Aga Khan Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, among many other positions.
He is a graduate of Pomona College with a BA in history and received a diploma in education from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, before receiving his doctorate in educational planning at Harvard’s Center for Studies in Education and Development.
The Hewlett Foundation’s Global Development Program makes grants to promote equitable growth in the developing world. It does this through grants to improve the effectiveness of aid, increase transparency and accountability in the provision of basic services to the poor, support reforms in agricultural policy to help farmers, and raise the quality of education.
About the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, environment, global development, performing arts, philanthropy, population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. A full list of all the Hewlett Foundation’s grants can be found here.