Mervin Bakker (1973) has been based in Pretoria since August 2017, as Regional Director of Nuffic’s Netherlands Education Support Office (NESO) in South Africa. NESOs operate in locations of strategic importance for the Dutch education and research sector, and are overseas offices of Nuffic, the Dutch organisation for internationalisation in education.

The NESO office in Pretoria supports the Dutch knowledge sector in its activities in South Africa and the wider region. These activities include reciprocal student mobility, capacity development, academic cooperation, scholarship programmes, the Holland Alumni network, and other education related projects and programmes like the Orange Knowledge Programme, the NRF-Nuffic Doctoral training programme and innovative internationalisation activities like #cocreateMYCITY.  

From 2011 until August 2017 Mervin was based in Jakarta (Indonesia) as Regional Director for the NESO offices in Southeast Asia. Before joining Nuffic, Mervin has worked for the University of Amsterdam as Manager International Programmes and Head of Marketing & Communications. Earlier in his career he worked for an education agent in Thailand and ran a student related business in the Netherlands. Mervin holds an MSc in International Economics & Economic Geography (1998) from Utrecht University and an MBA in Higher Education Management (2007) from the Institute of Education at University College London.