About the Author

He has held a number of teaching and research posts around the world, including at the University of Oxford, Simon Fraser University and University of Western Cap; his first job was a mathematics high school teacher in Zimbabwe.

His earlier work, Beautiful Tree (Penguin, New Delhi), was on the best-seller lists in India in 2010, and won the 2010 Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Prize. It builds on his ground-breaking research on private education for the poor in India, China and Africa, for which he was awarded the gold prize in the first International Finance Corporation/Financial Times Private Sector Development Competition. He was founding president of the Education Fund, Orient Global, living in Hyderabad, India, for two years, where he created a chain of low cost private schools. Since then he has helped set up a number of educational companies in China, Ghana, and India.

His work has been featured in an American PBS documentary, where it was profiled alongside the work of Nobel Laureate Mohammed Yunus and Grameen Bank. It also featured in a documentary for BBC World and on BBC Newsnight. He has been described in the pages of Philanthropy magazine as “a 21^st century Indiana Jones” travelling to “the remotest regions on Earth researching something that many regard as mythical: private, parent-funded schools serving the Third World poor.”

Tooley is currently chairman of education companies in Ghana and China creating embryonic chains of low cost private schools.