THE AUTHOR

Christopher D. Gerrard is a professional economist with more than 40 years’ experience in international development and evaluation. But, while pursuing an academic career at the University of Saskatchewan, he also became the central player in a decade-long drama, from 1983 to 1994, to secure firm legal foundations for independent schools and home-schooling in Saskatchewan—the principal focus on the present book.

After completing his work for the Saskatchewan Department of Education in 1994, he moved to Washington, DC, to work as an economist for the World Bank. There, he led an external training program on agricultural policy and institutional reform for sustainable rural development, primarily for government officials in African countries, to help them prepare and implement World Bank-supported projects in their own countries.

Then, while working for the Independent Evaluation Group from 1999 to 2013, he became a leading expert on evaluating the effectiveness of global and regional partnership programs (GRPPs) in which the World Bank was involved as trustee, financier, host of the secretariat, and/or implementer of projects. He was the lead author of several World Bank publications including the Sourcebook of Indicative Principles and Standards for Evaluating GRPPs (2007) and The World Bank’s Involvement in GRPPs: An Independent Assessment (2011).

While working for the World Bank, he also served, in a voluntary capacity, on the board of the Society to Explore and Record Christian History (SEARCH) from 2006 to 2013, which produced the twelve-volume illustrated history of Christianity from Pentecost to the present day: The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years. He served on both the American and Canadian charities that supported this work, as the treasurer for the American one, and as a peer-reviewer of the last six volumes from the Crusades to the end of the 20th Century.