Professor James Tooley
An internationally known scholar, Professor James Tooley is founder and director of the E. G. West Centre at Newcastle University in England. His most recent book The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest are educating themselves, published by Penguin (New Delhi) featured in the 2009 Christmas non-fiction best-sellers list for The Hindu (#1) and Hindustan Times (#10) newspapers. The book builds on his ground-breaking research on private education for the poor in India, China and Africa, for which Tooley was previously awarded gold prize in the first International Finance Corporation/Financial Times Private Sector Development Competition in September 2006. Following on from this, he was founding president of the Education Fund, Orient Global, living in Hyderabad, India for two years, where he helped create a chain of low cost private schools and associated educational infrastructure. Since then he has helped set up educational companies in China and Ghana, with a further company in India.
Prior to joining Newcastle University, Professor Tooley previously taught and researched at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester, England; Simon Fraser University, Canada; and University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His PhD is from the Institute of Education, University of London. His first job was a mathematics high school teacher in Zimbabwe.
His work featured in a 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 21st 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.”
Beautiful Tree Reviews
Microfinance Insights May 1st 2009
Washington Post June 19th 2009... "Tooley's passion comes off as genunie...."
City Journal June 19th 2009..."The Beautiful Tree is a refreshing aberration in the stolid ranks of development literature. Tooley writes engagingly and obviously finds the story he tells exciting. His enthusiasm is contagious. One cannot help but think that Tooley has provided the rudimentary outline of how education can be brought to many more millions of the world’s poorest".
Heritage Foundation August 10th 2009... "The Beautiful Tree deserves a wide audience and should be required reading for everyone involved in the struggle to ensure universal education for the world’s poor".