William Osafo-Mahama is an education economist and planner; a policy analyst and activity designer; with more than 25 years’ experience in international development programming and management in multiple country contexts, including Ghana, South Sudan, the United Kingdom and Uganda. Trained as a teacher and education planner, he has worked at education policy formulation and implementation levels with the Ministry of Education (MoE) in Ghana. For more than two decades, he has led the design, implementation, management and reporting of performance results on high quality education development programs with USAID, across multiple countries. Over the years, he has maintained consistent advocacy for innovative programs to reach marginalized and excluded populations with context relevant education services, ensuring inclusive programming of education resources towards the achievement of SDG targets for gender equity, universal completion of primary education and improved foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

William Osafo-Mahama is an experienced team leader, having managed diverse education portfolios with varying funding levels and programmatic complexities. As the Education Team Leader of the USAID/South Sudan Mission, he provided oversight for the management of the then USAID’s largest education development investment in Africa, programming $40 million annually in development assistance resources. As representative of the lead donor in the education sector in South Sudan, he provided coordinating oversight for; the planning and budgeting of the national education program within a context of uncertain resource envelop and fiscal austerity, and also led the successful development of South Sudan’s first application for a Program Implementation Grant to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Appointed in 1999 as the first-ever National Coordinator of the HIV/AIDS Secretariat of the MoE in Ghana, he led the processes for the establishment and resourcing of the HIV/AIDS Secretariat as a permanent divisional unit of the MoE.

William Osafo-Mahama has extensive experience in strategic planning and in the design of education development programs. In 2003, he provided technical leadership to USAID/Ghana’s Education Team for the design of the Mission’s, then, $85 million six-year education assistance strategy. In 2012, he led the design of the (then) single-largest-ever USAID-supported education program in Africa, a five-year $105 million Safe Schools program targeted at ensuring the provision of inclusive education serving the needs of historically marginalized and excluded populations in the post-conflict reconstruction of the South Sudan education system. As HIV/AIDS Coordinator for the education sector, he led the development of the first-ever HIV/AIDS Strategic Framework and Operational Plan for the education sector in Ghana. He provided the technical leadership for the development of the innovative and ambitious USAID/Uganda’s $155 million (five-year) integrated child development, basic education and youth development activity designed to provide a continuum of critical life-cycle services; for child well-being (safe, schooled and healthy childhood), foundational skills development (cognitive, social and emotional competencies, and work readiness) and youth development (for productive livelihoods) from child birth to adulthood. William is an accomplished manager of education development programs. As a certified USAID Contracting Officers’ Representative (COR) he has successfully managed the start-up, implementation and close-out, over a twenty-year period, of well over $600 million value in contracts and grant agreements for USAID/Ghana, USAID/South Sudan and USAID/Uganda.

For more than a decade, William Osafo-Mahama has been an advocate of local capacity building and institutional strengthening, and the active involvement of host country processes/structures/personnel in the sustainable design, delivering and monitoring of development assistance outcomes through the design and robust management of grants programs to local organizations. In 2001 he led the processes for the design, implementation and management of an incentive grants program where all (then) 110 district education offices in Ghana received up to $10,000 each from USAID for the direct implementation and management of ‘limited scope’ education development activities. As a member of the MoE-established Literacy Task Force that designed an innovative 'early-exit' bilingual literacy instructional approach, William developed the programmatic, disbursement and liquidation framework for the transfer of $7 million from USAID to MoE/Ghana, programmed in small grants of approximately $50,000 to each of the, then, 170 district education offices for the training of 80,000 teachers to support implementation of the literacy initiative. In 2011, he initiated the piloting of fixed-obligation grants (of $20,000 each) to three State Ministries of Education in South Sudan, within a post-conflict environment of nascent institutional systems and structures.

As a Monitoring and Evaluation technician, William Osafo-Mahama led and managed the design of the Performance Management Plan (PMP) of USAID/Ghana's education strategy in 2004 and that of USAID/South Sudan in 2011, as well as trained, mentored and led his colleagues at both Missions to undertake internally conducted data quality assessments (DQA) to meet USAID program performance reporting requirements. In 2007, William established the data reporting framework for the reconstruction of indicator results and the setting of targets for new standard indicators introduced by USAID/Washington for Operational Plan (OP) Report and Performance Plan Report (PPR) purposes. As the Monitoring and Evaluation Director of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) of Ghana, a high profile and programmatically visible socio-economic development vehicle William defined the performance requirements necessary for the establishment of a robust and responsive M&E systems, structures and procedures to support the valid and timely reporting of investment returns, results and impacts, and the generation of evidence-based reports on bridging the developmental gap between the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone (NSEZ) and southern Ghana.