Dr Silvia Montoya is the Director of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), which is the statistical branch of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she has taken a leadership role within the international education community by helping to build consensus around the standards, methodologies and indicators needed to measure progress towards Education 2030. This work entails a complete review of existing sources of information, as well as an evaluation of statistical capacity-building services needed to help Member States produce and use the resulting data. She has also launched the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning and serves as the Co-Chair of the Technical Cooperation Group on SDG 4–Education 2030 Indicators.

Prior to joining the UIS in 2015, Silvia was the Director-General of Assessment and Evaluation of Education Quality at the Ministry of Education, Buenos Aires where she oversaw the creation of the first comprehensive education quality index produced in Argentina and coordinated Argentina’s participation in several major international assessment programmes.

Dr Montoya was professor and researcher at the Catholic University of Argentina. She holds a Master’s and PhD in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and a Master’s in Public Administration from Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is the author of many publications on education, vocational training and labour market issues.