Hedley Thomas with this report in The Australian today.

JULIA Gillard is poised to take on her first major role since leaving politics with an international post in charge of a multi-billion-dollar fund dedicated to education for children in poorer countries.

About $270 million of taxpayers' money was signed off to go to the fund, Global Partnerships for Education, under the Kevin Rudd-led government and during Ms Gillard's prime ministership, according to a June 2013 report by the Foreign Affairs Department.

The chief executive of Global Partnerships is former JPMorgan senior banker Alice Albright, the daughter of Madeleine Albright who served as US secretary of state in Bill Clinton's administration.

Ms Gillard is Ms Albright's preferred choice to be the chairwoman of Global Partnerships and her probable imminent appointment has been flagged in meetings, senior sources revealed yesterday.

The "status of contributions" in the financial accounts highlight Australia as one of the most generous donors with a total value as of September 30 last year of $US303m, which is equivalent to the combined sum from the US, Russia, France, Italy, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Switzerland.

read more at The Australian here

Here's the Foreign Affairs statement promising $270M between 2011 and 2014.

Here's the table from the Global Partnerships website - surprise, surprise, when do you reckon the bulk of the money from Australia is due?   Labor was very good at promising with delivery in someone else's budget.

Our "pledge monitoring report" here makes for salutary reading.

Australia seems to have bucked the dominant trend of reducing money for this organisation, as reported in its consolidated reports here.

• Belgium, Canada, France, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, the United States and the European Union reduced their support to “basic education plus” (which includes general and secondary education spending) by $650 million between 2010 and 2011. However, cuts to “basic education plus” were buffered by an increase of $525 million from Australia, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ireland in the same period.