Elizabeth Hassan is a part-time PhD fellow in the GPAC2 programme. Her research interests include school funding and learning outcomes, school effectiveness and socio-economic considerations. Elizabeth's PhD research focuses on educational resilience of public secondary schools in Nigeria and she is supervised by Prof. Dr. Louis Volante and Prof. Dr. Wim Groot.
Elizabeth has over a decade of experience working with development finance institutions (DFIs), with a focus on sovereign financing, governance and policy, and international institutional law. She is currently a Senior Counsel at the OPEC Fund for International Development in Vienna. In that capacity, advises on the legal and policy aspects of development projects in various regions, including in education, health, finance, energy and infrastructure sectors. In parallel, she leads the Board Secretariat team in the implementation of strategic initiatives and the secretariat’s general work plan. She also managed the OPEC Fund’s first comprehensive governance review and the establishment of its Administrative Tribunal.
Previously, Elizabeth worked with the World Bank in Washington, D.C., first on operations policy and later as a transactional lawyer. She holds an LLB from the University of Jos, Nigeria, an advanced law degree from the Nigerian Law School, Lagos and an LLM from New York University (NYU), where she was awarded an International Finance and Development Fellowship. She currently co-chairs the board of directors of ALIFDO, which is the flagship network of lawyers across 20 DFIs, and sits on the editorial board of its journal. She is licensed to practice law in Nigeria and New York.