Shirley Burchfield

Adjunct Lecturer on Education

Profile

Shirley Burchfield has more than 25 years of experience in international education, with a strong focus on Africa. She is currently Vice President and head programs in Africa for World Education, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of the poor. At WEI, Burchfield provides guidance and technical assistance to government ministries and community-based organizations in developing countries, and applies her extensive experience building the capacity of key education stakeholders, such as NGOs, community-based organizations, parent-teacher organizations and school management committees. Her areas of interest include community participation, educational policy and planning, girls’ and women’s education, research, program management, and monitoring and evaluation.
Burchfield also served as research manager for the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, research associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development, and program director at the State University of New York at Albany. Additionally she worked as a resident advisor/education project director to ministries of education in Somalia, Botswana, and Lesotho, and a technical advisor to USAID. Burchfield’s research and capacity-building work spans 18 African countries, as well as Bolivia, Honduras, Jamaica, Jordan, Nepal, Peru, and the US. Additionally, she has taught statistics and quasi-experimental research design at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Somalia. At HGSE, she taught modules in Community Participation in Education: Lessons from Africa; Education, Culture and the Transfer of Educational Innovations; and Research in Developing Countries. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of Urban and Public Administration at the University of Texas at Arlington.