Dr. Prachi Srivastava is tenured Associate Professor specialising in education and international development, Western University, Canada. She is also Member of the World Bank Expert Advisory Council on Citizen Engagement. Previously, she served with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo and the International Rescue Committee. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.
Dr. Srivastava is working on the global education emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. She led a high-level policy brief for the T20 Task Force on COVID-19 which fed into the 2020 G20 Summit, and has been invited to provide expertise for the BE2 Education Donor Group, UNICEF, UNESCO, and a number of international/NGOs, and has provided recommendations for the Ontario Ministry of Education. She has been regularly interviewed and provided commentary in a number of media outlets on pandemic education effects.
Dr. Srivastava’s long-term research interests are: non-state private sector engagement in education; global philanthropy and impact investment; private schooling and education privatisation; and global education policy and the right to education in the Global South. She is recognised for coining the term, ‘low-fee private schooling’, and was one of the first researchers of the field.
Based on her work on non-state private engagement and global education policy, Dr. Srivastava has provided research evidence to the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Education for All (British Parliament), DFID UK, European Commission, Global Affairs Canada, JICA, the United Nations Inter-Parliamentary Union, UNESCO, and the World Bank, among others, and has been commissioned by DFID, the European Commission, and UNESCO. She is a signatory to the Abidjan Principles.
She has been interviewed in and contributed to a number of national and international media outlets on global education and political issues, including The Economist, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Devex, Vrij Nederland, L’actualité, CBC Radio-Canada.