Dr. Steven Block

Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Professor Steven Block is an Associate Professor of International Economics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He holds a Master of Public Policy and a Ph.D. in Political Economy from Harvard University. Currently studying food and agricultural policy, household nutrition, economic growth and rural development, his past research has focused on the effects of governance on economic growth in developing countries, and the factors influencing household nutritional status. Professor Block has also acted as consultant to the World Bank and USAID on numerous technical assistance missions in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Dr. Yolande Miller-Grandvaux

United States Agency for International Development

Dr. Yolande Miller-Grandvaux is a Senior Education Advisor in the Office of Education at the United States Agency for International Development in Washington DC. She holds a Master in International Educational Development from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She has extensive field experience with 10 consecutive years spent working in Africa as education planner, girls’ education specialist, education monitoring and evaluation advisor and chief of party for several USAID-funded education projects as well as other development agencies and NGOs. Her posts include Senegal, Mali, Niger and Benin. She has specifically conducted research on issues related to community schools and the role of non-government organizations in education in Africa, resulting in the publication of The Role of NGOs in Education in Africa and a Literature Review of Community Schools in Africa in 2002. She has recently been focusing on issues of education and fragile states and produced Education and Fragility: an Assessment Tool, in September 2006. She is currently spearheading an international group of donors to address the needs of education to mitigate fragility.

Dr. Leif Wenar

University of Sheffield

Dr. Leif Wenar is Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Visiting Professor Princeton Center for Human Values. In 2004–2005 he was the Fellow of the program Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council. He is widely published and his work has appeared in Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Mind, Analysis, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Columbia Law Review, and Philosopher’s Annual. He received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford and his doctorate from Harvard.

Dr. Stephen Peterson

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Stephen Peterson has worked on public financial management and international development for over twenty-one years at Harvard. He is a Lecturer in Public Policy, the Faculty Chair of the Executive Program in Public Financial Management and is a Senior Fellow in Development at the Kennedy School of Government. He is a specialist in public financial management and its reform, with over twenty years of experience as a resident advisor in Africa. He has just completed a twelve year $35 million project in Ethiopia which implemented a comprehensive reform of expenditure planning, budgeting, accounting and financial information systems. Through Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, he assisted the Ministry of Finance of the Palestinian National Authority and through the United States Treasury Department's Tax Advisory Service; he assisted several governments in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. He holds a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA in finance and management information systems from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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