Ben Piper

Ben Piper leads Global Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation based in Ethiopia. In this role he supports grantees focused on improving foundational literacy and numeracy in low- and middle-income countries. He was previously senior director, Africa Education, for RTI International, where he provided support to large-scale education projects across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Benjamin previously also served as the Chief of Party of the Kenyan national literacy program called Tusome, the set of randomized controlled trials in Kenya called PRIMR, and the National Tablets Programme. He was the principal investigator for Learning at Scale, a multicountry study of highly effective large-scale education programs and an external evaluation of programs increasing playful pedagogy at large scale with funding from the LEGO Foundation. He was also the principal investigator for Science of Teaching, an effort funded by the Gates Foundation to increase what is known about the technical details of how to improve pedagogy at large scale. He has a doctorate in international education from Harvard Graduate School of Education and master’s degrees in international education policy and school leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Furman University, respectively. He has lived in East Africa since 2007.