NewBoardofTrustees

Today (4 Aug 2021), Global Schools Forum is delighted to announce that following a global recruitment process we have made eight new appointments to our Board of Trustees.

The new board members are:

• Zia Akhter Abbas, Executive Vice President, The Citizens Foundation
• Stacey Brewer, Co-Founder and CEO, SPARK Schools
• Pablo Jaramillo, CEO, Alianza Educativa
• Nirav Khambhati, Managing Partner, Kaizenvest
• Vongai Nyahunzvi, Chief Network Officer, Teach For All
• Harry Anthony Patrinos, Practice Manager, Education, World Bank Group
• Paul Skidmore, Founder and CEO, Rising Academies
• Maya Ziswiler, Head of Programmes and Social Finance, UBS Optimus Foundation

They will join existing board members Michael Clark, Deputy CEO of Ark and Corina Gardner, Executive Director of IDP Foundation.

Shikha Goyal, Venture Partner at Imaginable Futures and Titise Kode, Head of Education at Vitol Foundation, will step down from the board following completion of their respective terms.

More detailed biographies of the new board members follow:

	Zia Akhter Abbas is an Executive Vice President at The Citizens Foundation. Zia leads TCF’s growing partnership with the Government as well as its global resource mobilization effort. He helped steer the process of developing TCF’s new organizational strategy to create 2 million agents of positive change by 2030. Under his stewardship, TCF has rapidly expanded its public-private partnership portfolio to 350+ school units educating more than 50,000 students. Before joining TCF in 2014, Zia spent 17 years at leading global financial services organizations including Citibank and Standard Chartered and served on the Board of Directors for the leading payments switch in Pakistan.
	Stacey Brewer is co-founder and CEO of SPARK Schools. Dedicated to making a difference and solving South Africa’s education challenges, Stacey launched the SPARK Schools network in 2012 and has been intricately involved in its evolution and growth ever since. She obtained an MBA in Entrepreneurship cum laude from the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS). At GIBS, Stacey channelled her passion for education into her thesis, which focused on a sustainable financial model for low-fee private schools in South Africa. This research served as the foundation for the establishment of SPARK Schools.
	Pablo Jaramillo is the current CEO of Alianza Educativa, a network of 11 charter schools that serves more than 11,000 underprivileged students in Bogotá. Prior to Alianza Educativa, Pablo served as Deputy Minister of K-12 Education of Colombia. He is one of the co-founders and former CEO of Enseña por Colombia, a partner of the Teach for All Network that has recruited more than 300 Colombian leaders to teach in underprivileged regions of the country. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Volunteers Colombia, a nonprofit that created one of the biggest English as a Second Language initiatives in the country by bringing more than 1.500 native speakers to serve as co-teachers in public and private schools throughout the country.
	Nirav Khambati is Managing Partner at Kaizenvest, with a focus on managing the firm’s private equity investments in India. He also led the firm’s expansion into Sub-Saharan Africa with an impact-first blended finance solution. Prior to joining Kaizenvest, Nirav was with the Tata Group for over 20 years in various roles including as the CEO of Tata ClassEdge and Tata Interactive Systems, and Vice President – Chairman’s Office. He is the founding co-chair of the education track of the Impact Future Project and is a member of the steering committee of Council of Confederation of Indian Industries’ School Summit. He is a nominee of the Indian government on the governing council of the Jagran Lakecity University. The British High Commission recognized Nirav as a Young India Leader in 2013.
	Vongai Nyahunzvi is Chief Network Officer at Teach For All. Earlier to this, Vongai ran her own leadership and organizational development practice, where her work spanned across 4 continents and over 28 countries. She has been on the UN Leadership Faculty and has facilitated several UN Country Team retreats across Africa and Europe. She has held senior level director roles in organisations such as BT Global, Royal Holloway University, London South Bank university only to name a few. Vongai is also a published author who has written books on leadership development.
	Harry Anthony Patrinos is Practice Manager, Education, at the World Bank Group. He leads a team based in Washington DC and in 24 European and Central Asian countries to provide strategic vision and direction, encourage and support innovation in both knowledge work and lending and manages staff to deliver results on the ground. He specializes in the economics of education. He managed operations in East Asia/ Pacific and Latin America/Caribbean. He has many publications in the academic and policy literature, with more than 50 journal articles. He has also worked in Africa and the Middle East. He previously worked as an economist at the Economic Council of Canada. He received a doctorate from the University of Sussex.
	Paul Skidmore is the founder and CEO of Rising Academies, a growing network of inspiring schools in West Africa. Launched in 2014, Rising provided emergency home-schooling to children in Sierra Leone kept out of school during the Ebola Crisis, before opening its first school in April 2015. Rising has since grown rapidly to reach 50,000 students in 190 schools in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ghana. During the Covid-19 epidemic, Rising’s distance learning solution “Rising On Air” has reached more than 10 million children in 12 languages across 25 countries. Before launching Rising Academies, Paul was a founding team member at the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and later served as Deputy CEO. He began his career as a think-tank researcher and government strategy advisor in the UK. He has a BA and MA from Manchester University, and an MPA from Princeton University. He was named a UBS Global Visionary and a Mulago Foundation Rainer Arnhold Fellow in 2019.
	Maya Ziswiler is Head of Programmes and Social Finance at UBS Optimus Foundation. Maya leads the UBS Optimus Foundation's team developing and managing high impact programmes in education, health, child protection and the environment. Prior to this role she was the Foundation's Program Director for Education and Early Childhood Development. She joined the Foundation from the Global Fund to Fight AIDs TB and Malaria, where she was responsible for managing partnerships with the private sector. Previously, Maya worked for UNICEF in Peru, Procter and Gamble's development and export markets focusing on Iran and Tunisia, and Peugeot in China. She holds a bachelor's degree from McGill University and a Master's from the University of Geneva. She speaks French, English, Spanish, German and some Mandarin Chinese.