Zia Akhter Abbas is President & CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), one of the world's largest privately-run networks of formal schools for low-income children and the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. He came to education sideways: an IB diploma at Lester B. Pearson United World College in Canada, an MBA from LUMS, then seventeen years in senior business and risk roles at Citi and Standard Chartered, plus a board seat at 1Link, Pakistan's leading payments switch. He left banking for TCF in 2014.

For a decade he led TCF's global resource mobilisation, working with a volunteer movement across 14 countries, building the organisation's global governance framework, stewarding its Government Partnership Schools network (400+ public schools now run by TCF), and driving TCF's Strategy 2030. He became President & CEO in June 2025.

The organisation he now runs began in 1995 with six friends in Karachi who met every Wednesday, decided education was the closest thing to a root cause, and built five schools with their own money. Today TCF operates 2,261 school units across 60+ districts, educates roughly 300,000 students, employs ~24,000 people including 15,000+ female faculty, runs its own construction company that completes two to three schools a week, and moves teachers 75,000 kilometres a day in a fleet of nearly 1,000 vans. Its results: 55% of TCF students complete intermediate (vs 27% nationally) and 26% enter university (vs 12% nationally). Zia is a Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum social entrepreneur and a board member of the Global Schools Forum.

In this episode, Zia talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Leaving banking for education after seventeen years — and why the nonprofit job turned out to be harder
• How TCF scaled from five schools to 2,261 units using the "unit concept," a cookie-cutter template for an entire school system — and what a sacred template costs you
• Pakistan's 25 million out-of-school children — a population the size of Australia — and why the state stopped building schools decades ago
• Funding 300,000 students with no government money: $60M+ last year from diaspora volunteers, chapters in 14 countries, institutional funders, and zakat acting as a global community endowment
• The all-female faculty decision, made intuitively rather than from research — and the finding that girls' enrolment drops 15% for every 500 metres of walking distance
• What broke when EdTech built for paying markets met dust, theft-prone tablet racks and 24-hour power cuts — and why TCF may have to build its own tools
• The Khan Academy Pakistan / Khanmigo pilot for Grades 6–8 maths and science, why it went teacher-facing rather than student-facing, and what principals said when asked if they'd ever use AI
• Why AI literacy training was rolled out before any AI tools — and why you educate 24,000 people rather than police them
• The Global South inversion: why the biggest unlock may be language, not tutoring, in a country where everything meaningful requires English
• Why the acute Western harms — mental health, isolation — look different when eight people share a room and the phone belongs to your father

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

Dr. Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili is Founder and President of Human Capital Africa, an accountability and advocacy organization devoted to Africa's foundational learning crisis — getting every child reading, writing and counting by age 10. An economic policy expert and chartered accountant by training, she was a co-founder of Transparency International and later served in the Nigerian government as Minister of Solid Minerals and then as Federal Minister of Education. She led the public procurement reform agenda that earned her the nickname "Madam Due Process."

She went on to serve as Vice President for the Africa Region at the World Bank, overseeing operations across 48 sub-Saharan countries. She co-founded the #BringBackOurGirls movement, ran for President of Nigeria in the 2019 elections, and founded the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG), an unconventional school now operating in Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya, with Ghana opening this year, whose graduates are already running for and winning public office. She also advises Club de Madrid, the forum of former democratic heads of state and government democracies and economic development including on AI regulation and governance.

In this episode, Oby talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Human dignity as the through-line of a career spanning Transparency International, two ministries and the World Bank — and why she now calls education "a living thing"
• Africa's demographic pivot — average age 18.9 years, and 85% of global workforce growth by 2050 — and why it leads to either a dividend or a disaster
• Why she stopped "wasting her voice on incorrigible leaders" and built a school to manufacture better ones instead, refusing national accreditation to escape captured systems
• The foundational learning crisis as a matter of life and death — nine in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa unable to read a simple sentence by age 10, and why she refuses to call a spade an agricultural implement
• What actually causes it: no early-childhood preparation, teaching in languages children don't speak, curricular overload, untrained and uncoached teachers, and ministries with no learning data
• What works and has been proven at scale — structured pedagogy, teaching at the right level, teacher coaching, and the question she puts to presidents: "Mr President, what did our children learn today?"
• Sobral in Brazil and India's NIPUN Bharat — a 20% improvement in learning outcomes in four to five years — as evidence that political will, not technical solutions, is the binding constraint
• Why the mobile telephony leapfrog (Nigeria: 500,000 landlines in 50 years, 200 million mobile lines after liberalisation) is the right mental model for AI in Africa
• The agency divide, not the digital divide — a child can have the most advanced AI system and still lack the knowledge and capability to use it purposefully and critically
• Data sovereignty, AI sweatshops on the continent, and why AI must free teachers for individualised attention and values — never replace them

Her three game changers for Africa: young people, African women, and technology as their enabler.

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

Dr. John Mugo is the Chief Executive Officer of Mizizi Elimu Afrika, the African-led education organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, formerly known as Zizi Afrique Foundation. He holds a Doctorate and a Master's degree in Special Needs Education from the University of Hanover, Germany, and a Bachelor of Education (Music) from Kenyatta University, where he went on to chair the Department of Special Needs Education.

Before founding the organization in 2018, he headed Uwezo, one of East Africa's largest citizen-led learning assessment initiatives, measuring what children actually know rather than what systems claim to teach. He leads ALiVE (Action for Life Skills and Values in East Africa), a regional framework and assessment system that has now assessed life skills and values in over 45,000 adolescents across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and works directly with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development on values-based education and teacher training reform.

In March 2026, Zizi Afrique rebranded as Mizizi Elimu Afrika — "mizizi" is Kiswahili for "many roots" — and launched Vision 2040: Strong Foundations for Lasting Change, a 15-year strategy to reach more than 10 million children across 10+ African countries with stronger foundational learning. His organization currently works across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Cameroon, and is piloting AI-supported teaching with Fab AI and Gemini in 15 Kenyan schools.

In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why fewer than 20% of children in much of Sub-Saharan Africa are learning at grade level — and why he calls that an "80 to 90% leakage" no amount of university investment can fix
• Vision 2040 and the two-lever theory behind it: strengthening government systems instead of building parallel NGO programmes, and forcing a competitive civil society sector to collaborate
• Why Africa's real AI problem isn't models but data — 800+ languages, oral cultures, and knowledge trapped in unpublished grey literature
• The case for voice data and mother-tongue AI as the fastest route to reading — drawn from his own experience learning to read in Kikuyu, not English
• What the Fab AI and Gemini pilot in 15 schools is showing about real-time assessment — and the widening gap between connected private schools and public schools without electricity
• The whole-school approach to values built with Kenya's curriculum institute and piloted in 79 schools — because responsibility and integrity can't be taught in a lesson slot
• Why place value in Grade 1 explains Kenya's KCSE maths results, and the 10-year roadmap to move Grade 3 numeracy proficiency from 30% to 75%
• His blunt advice to ministries drafting AI policy: stop banning it, start investing in your own data, and put young people in the driver's seat
• Why Africa's median age of 19 is an asset rather than a fiscal crisis — and what has to be true for that to hold

Links: Mizizi Elimu Afrika · ALiVE · Uwezo · Fab AI · AI for Education · KICD · John Mugo on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship