Rate My Professor Alnoor Ebrahim

Alnoor Ebrahim is the Thomas Schmidheiny Professor of International Business at The Fletcher School and Professor at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. He earned his PhD in Environmental Planning and Management from Stanford University in 1999, an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University in 1994, and a BSc in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. Prior to joining the Tufts faculty, Ebrahim taught at Harvard Business School, where he chaired two executive programs for social sector leaders, and at Virginia Tech. His research addresses core dilemmas of social change confronting businesses, nonprofit organizations, and public agencies, including strategies for delivering and scaling social impact, measuring and improving performance, handling competing demands for accountability from diverse stakeholders, and influencing systemic issues such as global poverty that require collective action.

Ebrahim authored the influential book Measuring Social Change: Performance and Accountability in a Complex World (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received awards from the Financial Times, the Impact and Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, and The Alliance for Nonprofit Management. He also wrote the award-winning NGOs and Organizational Change: Discourse, Reporting, and Learning (Cambridge University Press) and co-edited Global Accountabilities: Participation, Pluralism, and Public Ethics (Cambridge University Press). Notable publications include 'The governance of social enterprises: Mission drift and accountability challenges in hybrid organizations' (Research in Organizational Behavior, 2014), 'What impact? A framework for measuring the scale and scope of social performance' (California Management Review, 2014), and 'The Power of Lean Data' (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2016). He serves on advisory boards for the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the World Bank's Global Partnership for Social Accountability (GPSA), and previously contributed to IRIS+ at the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a G7 working group on social impact measurement, Acumen's Lean Data advisory council, and the board of Imago Global Grassroots. Ebrahim's research on World Bank accountability mechanisms informed Congressional testimony on improving the Bank's information disclosure policy. He teaches courses on leadership and strategy, as well as executive programs at The Fletcher School, Harvard, and Georgetown University.