Poornima has 9+ years of dedicated experience in education and development. Her primary areas of work include supporting education innovations to scale, education financing, policy design, strategy modelling and market research.

At GSF, she leads on the second cohort of the Impact at Scale Labs programme which is focussed on providing technical support and funding to non-state childcare and ECD organisations in East Africa, who have a bold and definitive vision for scale. She has also been responsible for leading on assessing the feasibility of initiatives around innovative and blended finance, including assessing the potential for setting up an Investment and Technical Assistance Facility to improve access to affordable capital for non state education organisations across 9 countries in South Assia and SSA.

She has previously worked with KPMG in India where she supported government stakeholders, funders, and private sector organisations in designing, implementing, and monitoring education and skills programmes and policies in India, and other countries in South Asia as well as the Middle East. Prior to that, she co-founded an online portal for volunteer management and project tracking for not-for-profit organizations, and has systematically engaged in pro-bono consulting with Think Tanks and NGOs in the fields of child rights, education, and gender.

She holds a Masters in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelors of Honours in Economics from the University of Delhi.