We are delighted to announce today that Manos Antoninis, who has been working for the GEM Report for six years as Senior Policy Analyst, has been appointed Director of the Report and will formally take up his functions on 1 August.

Since joining the team in 2011, he has led  the work on the monitoring of the EFA and now SDG goals and targets. In recent years, he has been closely involved in the development and refinement of ways to measure progress towards the new targets in our education goal, SDG4, notably by representing the team in the technical advisory group on post-2015 education indicators. He is currently the chair of the task force of the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning for SDG target 4.4.

During his time at the Report, he has managed the development of a crucial tool, the Worldwide Inequality Database on Education, WIDE, which brings together data from multiple surveys from over 160 countries to compare education outcomes between and within countries, according to multiple factors, including wealth, gender, ethnicity and location. He has also coordinated the financing gap estimates for the 2030 education targets and the projections for the achievement of universal primary and secondary education completion.

Manos joined the team from Oxford Policy Management, a development policy consultancy. He has extensive experience as a monitoring and evaluation specialist of education and public finance projects globally. He managed a secondary education public expenditure tracking and service delivery survey in Bangladesh; contributed to the evaluation of a basic education project in the western provinces of China; was core member of the mid-term evaluation team of the Education For All Fast Track Initiative on monitoring and evaluation issues; and led the annual reporting of progress in the implementation of the Second Primary Education Development Project in Bangladesh. He was the technical lead for the monitoring and public finance components of a large basic education capacity building programme in six states in Nigeria; developed the evaluation of an in-service, cluster-based teacher training programme in Pakistan; and authored the country study of the Out of School Children Global Initiative in Indonesia. He spent three years in Albania at the office of the Prime Minister developing a coordination unit for the national strategy with emphasis on the social sectors.

He holds a BA in International Economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business and an MSc in Development Economics from the University of Oxford. His DPhil was a study of technical education and the labour market in Egypt, completed at the Centre for the Study of African Economies of the University of Oxford.

Manos takes up the mantle as Director at an exciting time, with the imminent launch of the 2017/8 GEM Report on Accountability and Education, and the team now starting to research the 2019 Report on migration and displacement. As he takes on these tasks, he welcomes any comments, or messages readers may have and can be reached on m.antoninis@unesco.org or twitter: @ManosAntoninis.

We are thrilled to make this announcement today, and ask you to join us in congratulating him!