Martin Benavides

Martin Benavides

Bio and Research Interests

Martin Benavides is Director of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). Before joining IIEP, he served as Minister of Education of Peru in 2020. He oversaw the country's pre-primary, primary, secondary, and higher education systems and designed the national strategy for distance education in response to the pandemic. Between 2018 and 2020, he served as the head of Peru’s National Superintendence of Higher University Education (SUNEDU), the regulatory body of Peru's university system where he led the reform for improving the quality of higher education. He is Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (on leave) in the Department of Social Sciences. He is also Principal Investigator at the Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE, on leave), His research in education offered institutional perspectives on the expansion and quality of university education and reforms in basic education, but also on understanding persistent inequalities. He also contributed to Latin American literature on childhood and violence, and on inequality, ethnicity and social mobility. In 2006-2007, Martín was Research Director at GRADE, then he was its Executive Director from 2008 to 2014. He was visiting researcher at CEPED/Institut de Recherche pour le Développement – Université de Paris.in France and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Martín holds a PhD in Sociology from Penn State University.