Profile
Perran Penrose is an economist and studied at the Universities of Oxford and London. He has worked since 1970 in many countries in South and South East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Central America, and Eastern Europe. He specialises in economic policy, public finance and budgeting, and also in education planning and finance. In the 1970s he was a director of a leading NGO; taught in the University of Libya and what is now Addis Ababa University; and was a government officer in the (then) North West State of Nigeria. In the 1980s he was managing director of a consulting company in the UK and regional managing director of a consultancy group in Southern, Central and Eastern Africa, based in Lusaka. Since 1990 he has worked as an independent consultant. He is at present engaged in a number of advisory positions. He has been advising the Ministry of Finance in Viet Nam on financial policy analysis, and the Vietnamese National Assembly on matters of budget oversight. He is also adviser to the Department of Finance in the Government of Dubai on the public finance reforms there.
From 1999 – 2008 he worked as part of a Harvard University team in Ethiopia on the budget planning reform. He has recently advised the Indonesian Parliament and the Ministries of National Education and Religious Affairs on financing the decentralised school system. He advised the government of Thailand on the decentralisation of basic education as part of the Thai budget reform. In the last decade he has worked with the Armenian Ministry of Finance on its reform programme; the Romanian Ministries of Education and Finance on the decentralisation of education; the Ministry of Finance in Jamaica on its economic reform programme; the Ministry of Education in Ghana; the Ministries of Finance and Education in Tanzania; and other assignments in South Asia, the Caribbean, and several African countries.
He also teaches in the areas of public finance, economics and education. He is an Associate of the Cambridge University Centre for International Business and Management in the Judge Management School. He has been a Tutor in Public Policy Management for the Centre of Financial Management Studies (CeFiMS) in the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, for which he has directed short executive courses, including the Budget Reform Executive Programme. He wrote the CeFiMS distance learning module for the master’s degree (MSc) in Public Finance Management. He has been a Visiting Fellow in the University of East Anglia, UK. He taught over a period of three years a regular one week intensive course on Public Finance Management to senior officials of the European Commission, and gives courses to other donors: he teaches a public finance management course for the Swedish International Development Agency in Stockholm. He also teaches public finance in the Dubai School of Government, and has taught in the National Chenchi University in Taipei, Taiwan.
He has traveled widely in Africa, the Middle East, South and South-East Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia, Central America and the Caribbean. He has worked with a number of voluntary organizations, and advises, and sits on the councils and boards of, several non-governmental organizations. He is Chairman of Link Community Development, a leading international NGO concerned with school development and education management.