The Right Honorable Gordon Brown

Biography

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown is a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He serves now as United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and as WHO Ambassador for Global Health Financing to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Dr Brown served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010 and is widely credited with preventing a second Great Depression through his stewardship of the 2009 London G20 summit. He was one of the first leaders during the global crisis to initiate calls for global financial action, while introducing a range of rescue measures in the UK. In April 2009, he hosted the G20 Summit in London where world leaders committed to make an additional $1.1 trillion available to help the world economy through the crisis and restore credit, growth and jobs. They also pledged to strengthen financial supervision and regulation.

He served as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1997 to 2007 – his ten-year tenure remains the longest of any Chancellor in modern British history. During his decade at the Treasury, Dr Brown was the architect of many of Labour’s proudest achievements including the Minimum Wage, Sure Start, the Winter Fuel Allowance, the Child Trust Fund, the Child Tax Credit and paid paternity leave. His record on global justice includes his negotiation of debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations and the tripling of the budget for life-saving aid. His time as Chancellor was also marked by major reform of Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy as well as sustained investment in health, education and overseas aid.

His role in government continued to shape his views on the importance of education as a fundamental right of every child in the world and the key to unlocking better health, greater social stability, more rights and opportunities for women and a higher standard of living. He is a passionate advocate for global action to ensure education for all. In his role as UN Special Envoy for Global Education, he works closely with key partners to help galvanise support for global education investment and the use of innovative financing to reach the UN’s global goals. He has served as the Chair of the High-Level Steering Group for Education Cannot Wait, the fund for education in emergencies (under his tenure $2.8 billion was raised, reaching more than 11 million children in war and crisis zones); and was Chair of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity that led to the creation of the International Financing Facility for Education (IFFEd).

Dr Brown is the author of numerous publications, including My Life, Our Times (2017); Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation (2010); Seven Ways to Change the World: How to Fix the Most Pressing Problems We Face (2021); and, with Michael Spence and Mohamed El-Erian, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix Our Fractured World (2022).

Dr Brown has a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer and in television production. He has been awarded several honorary doctorates including the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Abertay and The Open University as well as a number of international doctorates. He was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 2024 King’s Birthday Honours List.

In 2020, he played a key role leading a group of 275 former world leaders, economists and educationalists calling for international action to prevent the global health crisis from creating a “COVID generation” of tens of millions of children without a chance of an education.

In his role as WHO Ambassador, Dr Brown has been invited by WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to raise awareness internationally on the need for sustained global health financing, particularly from G20 and G7 countries, to finance the vaccination of the whole world and protect the poorest countries from COVID-19 and other diseases.

In addition to his global education work, Dr Brown is an advisor to the Graça Machel Trust, a Senior Panel Member at the Kofi Annan Foundation initiative on Electoral Integrity, and he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Within the United Kingdom, Dr Brown is President of The National Family Centre, the umbrella charity of the Multibank movement, founded first in his home county, Fife, in 2021 as a campaign to alleviate household material poverty by rescuing and redistributing surplus home, hygiene and clothing products to families. Mulitbanks now operates across Britain. Dr Brown is also the founder of Our Scottish Future, a non-profit research and campaign organisation focused on building a stronger Scotland in a better Britain.

He is married to Sarah Brown, who chairs the global children’s charity Theirworld and is Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education. The couple live in Fife, Scotland.