Dr. Faisal Bari
CEO & Senior Research Fellow
Dr. Faisal Bari is the CEO and co-founder at IDEAS Pakistan, and also serves as Senior Research Fellow. Dr. Faisal Bari is also an Associate Professor on joint-appointment for Education and Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He has also served as the Dean of the LUMS School of Education. His research spans disability inclusion, gender representation in textbooks, the use of education technology for TPD, teacher politics and the political economy of teacher recruitment and retention, and the role of the private sector in education reform.
He is a member of the Higher Education Commission and has previously served as a Board Member for the Punjab Examination Commission. As member Punjab Examination Commission, he provided technical input in the reform of Punjab examination systems towards adoption of school based formative assessments. His work in education research and policy involves; leading performance evaluation work for DFID’s PESP II programme, collaborating with researchers from University of Cambridge to investigate how education can be made inclusive of diverse backgrounds, revising the Non-Salary budget for Public Schools in Punjab. His background work on social protection programs contributed to the development of the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP).
He also served as the Deputy Country Director for Pakistan with the Central Eurasia Project, and education economist for South Asia at the Open Society Foundation. He has previously served as Head of Economics Department at LUMS from 2006-2008, and is a former executive director and visiting research fellow at Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre. Dr. Bari has consulted for various multi-lateral and bi-lateral agencies including the World Bank, UNDP, DFID and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He was also a columnist for the English daily, ‘The Nation’ and he currently writes a bi-weekly column for ‘DAWN’.