Dr. Modupe Adefeso-Olateju is Managing Director of The Education Partnership (TEP) Centre and a policy expert specializing in public-private partnerships in education. In 2013 she led the establishment of TEP Centre which is Nigeria’s pioneering education partnership organization with a mission to improve the overall design, implementation, and evaluation of education initiatives through effective, enduring, and scalable partnerships. Under Mo’s leadership, TEP Centre has grown into a formidable organization with a staff strength of 52 and 10 Associates in three countries as well as a global advisory board. It holds membership of the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network and the United Nations Global Compact.

Mo leads workstreams on a range of education sector support initiatives funded or assisted by international donor organizations and corporate funders, and trains public sector officials and development organizations on strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation, and evidence-based policy-making. She is leading the implementation of LEARNigeria; Nigeria’s citizen-led household assessment and advocacy program which assesses the foundational literacy and numeracy competencies of thousands of children and youth aged 5-18 in Nigeria, advocates for evidence-based policymaking, and support the implementation of effective remedial programs for communities. Mo also leads the team which plans and hosts the annual pan-African Education Innovation Summit (NEDIS) which focuses on identifying and scaling education innovations across Africa. 

As a public policy expert, Mo advises state governments on the role of evidence for policymaking, thereby improving the use of data in the public sector. She regularly comments on education policy issues in the media and at education sector convenings, and has published several peer-reviewed articles, and has been invited to deliver education-focused keynote addresses at over 15 public and private sector conferences. Mo is actively involved in policy development in Nigeria – she was a co-convener of Nigeria’s Annual Education Conference (NAEC) hosted by the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Education in 2018, 2019, and 2020. In 2020, she led the team which planned the thematic focus and agenda of the NAEC. In 2020 she was also invited by the Minister of State for Planning to join the Technical Working Group (TWG) charged with developing Nigeria’s Mid-Term and Strategic National Development Plans for Education and Human Capacity Development and served as coordinator of the drafting process for these high-level plans. 

Mo is a 2020/21 Fellow of the Asia-Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Fellow of the National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) in Nigeria. Mo was awarded a distinction in her Masters’ dissertation which explored the effectiveness of public-private partnerships in Nigeria’s education sector. She is also a recipient of the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education Centenary Scholarship for Africa. At UCL IOE, Mo earned a Ph.D. in Education and International Development where her research probed the effectiveness of public and private schools in Nigeria and proposed a framework for public-private partnership (PPP) in the education sector.

Mo is committed to the reform of education across the West African and broader sub-Saharan African region and she believes that only by effectively pooling the capacities of governments, the non-state sector, and the international community can Africa harness the latent potential of its massive and rapidly growing youth populations. Her skill and diplomacy in successfully convening sensitive public-private policy discourses are recognized in the subregion.