Team
C-Suite & Global Directors
Angelica Towne Amporo
-
Angelica Towne Amporo started Educate! with her Co-founders based on the shared values of scale, sustainability, and the power of young people to change the world.
Angelica built Educate! from scratch, combining her experience piloting youth programs in Jamaica and Ethiopia with her creativity and passion for spearheading the creation, development, and continued evolution of Educate!’s model.
For the last six years, she has lived and worked in Uganda overseeing the implementation of Educate!’s programs in 250 schools. She also adapted Educate!’s course curriculum for use in the Uganda national curriculum and designed a new practical standardized examination, reaching 25,000 young people annually.
Angelica’s goal is to transform traditional classrooms into training grounds for youth to learn the skills to end poverty in their own lives and their communities. In her words: “I know firsthand what it means to be literally saved by nonprofit organizations that embody creative solutions to society’s opportunity gaps. At Kyangwali Refugee Camp, I swapped stories with other youth who received “sponsorship” or scholarships to attend university and how it changed our lives forever. I felt such a beautiful solidarity with our students and reaffirmation of the necessity of this work.”
Angelica was twice named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list of social entrepreneurs. She was honored with the Mulago Foundation's prestigious Rainer Arnhold Fellowship and the Global Good Fellowship in 2015. She holds a BA from Middlebury College. Angelica has been with Educate! since 2008.
Maggie Appleton
-
Maggie Appleton oversees operations and leads Educate!'s government engagement strategy and innovation in Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya.
Formerly, Maggie was Educate!'s Program Director in Uganda, living and working in Kampala for almost six years. She led Educate!'s programs team through its first significant growth phase from 54 to 240 schools in 2014 and worked closely with the Global Director in designing Educate!'s programs and operational systems for scale.
She is inspired most by Educate!’s proactive approach: “We all know about the problems that challenge our world, most especially Africa. I love Educate! because it empowers young people to think about solutions!” Maggie also graduated with a master’s degree in International Education at Columbia University, Teachers College in 2017. Maggie has been with Educate! since 2009.
Alex Kelly
-
Alex Kelly is the Director of Growth at Educate!. He also oversees the External Relations team, as well as directs the finance and operations of the US country team. His unique value add is being able to guide a program in short-term implementation excellence, while simultaneously setting it up to reach concrete improvement milestones that allow for healthy growth.
Alex is an international development practitioner who has almost ten years of experience implementing programmatic work and overseeing growth-oriented strategy. He is excited to return to working on issues that directly impact youth, as he has always been perpetually impressed with the resiliency and potential of youth — and knows that with a little support they can do incredible things.
Before joining Educate!, Alex lived in western Kenya for six years, where he worked for One Acre Fund (OAF) to help provide sustained food security and pathways to prosperity for smallholder farmers. At OAF, he was most recently the director of the Kenya Field Operations program. In this role, he focused on growing the team and increasing impact, eventually reaching over 450,000 farmers throughout the country. Prior to his time with OAF, Alex worked in field-based roles at development NGOs in Nepal and El Salvador. He is also a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Costa Rica, where he focused on children, youth, and family programming. Alex has been with Educate! since 2020.
Boris Bulayev
-
Under Boris’s leadership, Educate! has grown to become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa, meaningfully impacting over 500,000 youth across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania.
With a team of over 300 staff and 300 youth mentors, the organization has received much acclaim for its work, including the 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and the 2015 WISE Award. Educate! was also highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE Impact Portfolio, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative, the UN’s Generation Unlimited as one of 20 innovative youth solutions, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.
As an immigrant from Latvia and a refugee himself, Boris believes in the power of giving young people access to mentorship and transformative learning experiences - both of which allowed him to move from starting in the US on welfare and food stamps to where he is today.
Before jumping into Educate! full-time, Boris worked at startup incubator Loeb Enterprises. Boris is a recipient of the 2011 Grinnell College Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize, and a two-time Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.
Boris has been with Educate! since 2004.
Charlotte Jones
-
Charlotte oversees design, innovation and scaling for our school system solutions. She is responsible for partnering with governments to put in place the systems and structures that empower teachers and leaders to change student lives.
Charlotte joined Educate! from Education Development Trust from a senior leadership role where she was responsible for the company’s global portfolio of education products. Over her 10 years there she worked with partners including government ministries, FCDO, the Education Commission and IIEP-UNESCO to catalyze new innovations and thought leadership on ‘what works’ to lead educational change at scale.
With a background in organizational effectiveness and change management at Korn Ferry, Charlotte is passionate about helping leaders turn their dreams into real impact on the ground. Her professional interests are behaviour change and collaborative leadership, and she is a published author and thought leader in this field.
Charlotte is inspired by Educate!’s creative and focused solutions for youth employment, and commitment to scalable products that are designed to reach every single student and the very last mile. She loves meeting students and seeing the glint in their eyes as they talk about their new experiences. In her spare time Charlotte loves any kind of live music she can get her ears and eyes on, and can often be found in the tablaos de flamenco in Barcelona, where she currently lives. Charlotte has been with Educate! since 2022.
Ivan Ssenfuma
-
Ivan is a finance and operations professional, a graduate of Economics from the Egerton University, and a member of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya.
Over his 14 years of practicing experience across East Africa, he has built a passion and record of robust systems in organizations in different industries, including audit, energy, international development, education, and healthcare.
Ivan joined Educate! because of his passion for developing young people in Africa. He is inspired by Educate!’s unwavering focus on the youth of Africa, reflected in major and minor decisions in the organization.
He organizes book gifting and reading visits to slum families in Kampala with his daughter to develop literacy among underprivileged families in his spare time. He is a self-proclaimed Tintin comic aficionado, songwriter, and guitar player. Ivan has been with Educate! since 2016.
Hannah Ornas
-
As Chief of Staff, Hannah works with Educate!’s teams across geographies to advance strategic initiatives and strengthen organizational capacity to support Educate! in achieving its growth and impact goals.
Hannah is a global development professional with experience spanning public administration, strategic communications, fundraising and business development.
Prior to joining Educate!, Hannah worked with the International Rescue Committee, where she supported refugee resettlement programming for arriving families and youth in the U.S.
She is passionate about expanding opportunity for young people and promoting equitable and inclusive approaches to tackling development challenges. Hannah studied with the School for International Training in Tanzania and graduated with distinction from the University of Colorado Boulder with a B.A in Sociology and Public Health. She holds a Master of Public Administration concentrating in International Policy from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy. Hannah has been with Educate! since 2018.
Meghan Mahoney
-
Meghan Mahoney oversees Educate!’s performance monitoring systems and strategic learning agenda: designing evaluations and data systems, managing their execution, and processing the resulting data for learning.
Prior to joining Educate!, Meghan oversaw the youth and labor markets sector for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT and evaluated a sustainable agriculture and micro-credit program in Nicaragua. Meghan also studied Development Economics and Program Evaluation at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and Economics and International Relations at American University.
Meghan has been with Educate! since 2016.
Kayode Kolade
-
Kayode has spent the last 12 years building systems that enable organizational performance, operational efficiency and leading the execution of strategic projects across the industries of construction, ecommerce, business process outsourcing and education.
He started out as a cost consultant and project manager, after which he joined Jumia market as a pioneer Business Strategist and left as the Head of Strategy, Projects & Field Sales. He worked with Teleperformance’s TLScontact for over 6 years, building its operations from scratch in Nigeria -providing direction for a team of 150 people serving the UKVI and the Australian DIBP clients while delivering world-class service through a daily average of 1,000 physical customer interactions in the role of Country Manager. He was most recently the Director of Enterprise Transformation & Strategic Operations at African Leadership University (ALU) overseeing both Mauritius & Rwanda.
Kayode is an alumnus of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria; who has also obtained executive education from MIT Sloan School of Management & University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School in Design Thinking & Digital Transformation Strategies respectively. He is currently doing his Executive MBA at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam and he is a Brain-Based Certified Coach with the NeuroLeadership Institute. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & Management.
He is passionate about working with the youth and working with Educate! brings together his passion and expertise over the years. His role at Educate! spans strategy & operations performance oversight, leading strategic initiatives and org-wide matrix coordination. Kayode has been with Educate! since 2022.
Missy Mwendwa Kago
-
Missy Mwendwa Kago is the Chief Product Officer at Educate! She leads the organization's Product Operation function and Out-of-School Youth (OoSY) solution strategy across East Africa. Missy spearheads the development of Educate!'s first OoSY product, NawiriPro, an African-led online skills learning, financing, and business advisory platform.
Missy is passionate about scaling African technology worldwide and developing African economies through mobile technology. She has built numerous businesses and products in countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Somalia. Missy has partnered with regional and local telecoms such as Safaricom, Orange, MTN, Tigo, and Airtel to scale Eneza Education products to over 4 million African youth in four years. Her work in the product and geographical expansion of Shupavu 291 led Eneza Education to win the Best Mobile Innovation for Education category at the GSMA's Global Mobile (GLOMO) Awards in February 2018. She is also the Co-Founder of the Nairobi EdTech community.
In September 2020, Missy, in collaboration with Educate!, launched a new social enterprise unit called "NawiriPro" based in Kenya. NawiriPro currently serves the transport (boda boda) industry and has validated a 131% income boost for new youth business owners and a 36% income boost for existing boda youth business owners after using NawiriPro. This achievement was possible through partnerships with financial institutions, marketplace apps, and driving schools. Her work with Educate! was recognized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for progress toward decent work and economic growth in 2020. Missy has been with Educate! since 2019.
Florence Tesha
Global Leaders
Uganda Leaders
Cross-cutting Teams: Uganda
In-School: Uganda
Out-of-School: Uganda
Kenya Leaders
Cross-cutting Teams: Kenya
Out-of-School: Kenya
Rwanda Leaders
Cross-cutting Teams: Rwanda
In-School: Rwanda
Tanzania Leaders
Cross-cutting Teams: Tanzania
In-School: Tanzania
Board of Directors
Dzingai Mutumbuka
-
Dzingai has over 40 years of experience in education and development. He previously served as Chair of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) for nine years. Prior to that, he held various senior management positions in the education sector, at the World Bank from 1990-2007, and as the Minister of Education in Zimbabwe from 1980-1990. Currently, Dzingai sits on several boards involved with education, including RISE, Results for Development Institute, Teach for All, Big Win Philanthropy, Vitol Foundation, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), and Harvard Ministerial Leadership Program. He holds a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Sussex.
Jeff Aludo
-
Jeff’s experience in Africa and other emerging markets drives his passion for sustainable development on the ethos of shared value. He has a focus on organization and strategic transformation. He often shares his voice by penning columns in leading publications.
His consulting and industry sector experience spans more than 20 years, with senior roles held at leading consulting firms such as Deloitte US and PwC, with additional experience leading international strategy and operations advisory firms. Additionally, he brings astute strategic communications, public affairs, and risk-advisory consulting experience to clients advocating for public and private sector participation for sustainable social impact.
Jeff receives invites from leading corporates to provoke the thinking of board and senior management on topics such as corporate strategy planning, organization models, and transformational leadership. He is an adjunct professor and executive fellow at Strathmore University’s leading business school and sits on the boards of various organizations.
Amy Kates
-
Amy is an organization designer. She serves as a trusted advisor to business leaders in successful companies around the world, working with them to assess organizational issues, reshape structures and processes, and build depth of management capability. She was a co-founder of Kates Kesler Organization Consulting. Kates Kesler was acquired by Accenture in 2020 and Amy served as a Senior Managing Director for Accenture, growing a global practice. In addition to her consulting work, Amy taught organization design in the Executive MBA program at the Executive School of Business in Denmark and through Cornell University. Amy Kates is a co-author, with Greg Kesler, of the book Networked, Scaled, and Agile: A Design Strategy for Complex Organizations (2021) and Bridging Organization Design and Performance: Five Ways to Activate a Global Operation Model (2015). She is the author of three other best-selling books in the field and the developer of the LinkedIn Learning organization design video series. She is a past editor of the journal People & Strategy. The organization design approach and tools Amy has developed with Jay Galbraith and Greg Kesler have become the standard internal design methodology used in dozens of major corporations around the world.
Amy also has a deep interest in regenerative farming and is developing a farm-stay resort in Rwanda, called Ishobe, that highlights the value of local and traditional farming techniques for today’s environmental challenges.
Amy began her career as a planner and Urban Fellow with New York City. She has a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. Amy lives in New York City with her family.
Radhika Malpani
-
Radhika is a seasoned philanthropist, board member, and climate tech investor with a distinguished career in the technology sector spanning over three decades. Having held senior executive positions at renowned organizations like Google, Radhika has now shifted her focus to combating climate change.
At Google, Radhika was a Senior Engineering Director and was responsible, over a period of about 20 years, for initiating and scaling up several critical products. Starting with leading Google Ads in 2000, Radhika built Google Images, growing it over a period of about 7.5 years to over 1B queries/day and ~70% market share. In addition to starting Google Local Search, she also led Google Travel Search to help users better plan their leisure trips.
With a deep-seated interest in leveraging technology for social good, Radhika left Google in mid-2019 to focus full-time on helping mission-driven startups scale. Radhika now serves on multiple boards, including Educate!, Simprints, and Island Conservation. She also advises startup founders, drawing upon her extensive experience in building and scaling successful products and organizations. Her expertise enables founders to navigate critical strategic considerations.
Radhika’s experience working in the social sector has propelled her towards a dedicated focus on climate change. She spent a year at Stanford as a fellow in Stanford’s Distinguished Career Institute, deepening her focus. She is a lecturer at The Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford, where she co-teaches entrepreneurship focused on climate change, and an associate adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz. Radhika’s primary areas of interest lie at the intersection of oceans and climate change.
Mohamed Osman
-
Mohamed Osman is Spring Impact’s CEO, leading the organization’s UK and US offices.
A senior non-profit executive, he is committed to delivering innovative solutions to social challenges. He brings over 20 years of experience implementing programs and building partnerships in global health, social enterprise, and humanitarian assistance across 25 countries.
Mohamed was previously Global Grants Director at the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF), where he spent a decade growing the Foundation to become one of the foremost independent AIDS charities in the world — reaching over 100 million people with HIV information, testing, and treatment.
Mohamed is also on the board of The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Mohamed has established himself as a trusted convener of key stakeholders for development and implementation of high-level, high-stakes, high-risk partnerships in global health.
Mohamed has an MSc from the London School of Economics. Born in Kenya, he has a lifelong commitment to serving those who are marginalized or underserved.
Devang Vussonji
-
Devang Vussonji is a Co-Founder at Axum, an Afrocentric firm tackling socioeconomic development, climate change, and technological innovation.
Based in Tanzania, Devang is passionate about collaborating with African leaders, governments, and organizations to solve the challenges facing their communities. He is particularly interested in developing self-sustaining solutions that reduce aid dependency. He is currently building multi-partner initiatives that are driving systems change in sectors such as education, food systems, and climate.
In the education sector, Devang has created Elimu-Soko, which introduces innovative solutions in public education systems. The initiative is developed in collaboration with the Hempel Foundation, and piloted by the Governments of Rwanda and Zanzibar. The initiative partnered with Rising Academies in Rwanda and TeachUNITED in Zanzibar to improve foundational learning outcomes by 2-3x for approximately 20,000 students in each location. The respective governments are now working on the scale-up of the innovations across the full system.
In the food systems sector, Devang has created the Africa Green Food Systems Investment Catalyst, in collaboration with AGRA, FOLU, GAIN and IDH. The initiative aims to support market-led growth and private sector investments in strategic value chains across the continent. The initiative aims to support countries to develop their green food systems strategies, including costed investment plans and flagship initiatives, and it then supports countries in unlocking capital for their priority investments. The coalition is building on its past work in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone, as well as undertaking new partnerships in markets such as Ethiopia.
In the climate sector, Devang has built an initiative called BIRA, in collaboration with the African Leadership University’s School of Wildlife Conservation, XILVA, CreditNature, FSD Africa Investments and Baotree. The initiative has created Africa’s First Biodiversity Project Accelerator, which unlocks investments for nature-positive businesses. After the success of its first accelerator, BIRA is now launching a second accelerator, in partnership with the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. The accelerator will provide knowledge, networks, and acceleration support to organizations in 3 sectors: regenerative agriculture, forest protection, and the ocean economy.
Devang also plays an advisory role for initiatives such as: 1) the Climate-Smart Forest Economy Program, which aims to unleash the potential of biobased construction; 2) Sounds Right, which is unlocking new revenue sources for nature projects. In the past, Devang has also supported: 1) the African Circular Economy Alliance, which aspires to make sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing more circular through policy reform, corporate engagement, and entrepreneurship support; and 2)Safe Hands Tanzania, which provided sanitation products to communities during COVID.
Prior to Axum, Devang was a Partner at Dalberg – based in South Africa and Tanzania – where he advised public and private sector clients for 12 years. He also led Dalberg’s Education to Employment practice and chaired its Global People & Values Committee. One of his landmark projects was helping the Government of Tanzania change its policy framework for the sunflower sector, which will help the countryachieve its industrialization objectives and reduce its reliance on imported palm oil.
Before moving to Africa, Devang worked for 6 years with Mercer Consulting’s Human Capital Development business in the United States. He holds an MBA with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a degree in Economics from Claremont McKenna College.
Boris Bulayev
-
Under Boris’s leadership, Educate! has grown to become the largest youth employment and skills provider in East Africa, meaningfully impacting over 500,000 youth across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania.
With a team of over 300 staff and 300 youth mentors, the organization has received much acclaim for its work, including the 2018 Klaus J. Jacobs Prize and the 2015 WISE Award. Educate! was also highlighted by the World Bank’s S4YE Impact Portfolio, The Brookings Institution as one of 14 case studies in their global scaling education learning initiative, the UN’s Generation Unlimited as one of 20 innovative youth solutions, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Goalkeepers Accelerator.
As an immigrant from Latvia and a refugee himself, Boris believes in the power of giving young people access to mentorship and transformative learning experiences - both of which allowed him to move from starting in the US on welfare and food stamps to where he is today.
Before jumping into Educate! full-time, Boris worked at startup incubator Loeb Enterprises. Boris is a recipient of the 2011 Grinnell College Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize, and a two-time Forbes Top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur.
Boris has been with Educate! since 2004.
Eric Glustrom
-
Eric Glustrom is the founder and CEO of Watson Institute and the co-founder of Educate!. Watson Institute is dedicated to supporting next-generation entrepreneurs and leaders to forge impactful, successful careers by partnering with institutions to reimagine talent development systems.
Graduate of Amherst College in Biochemistry and recognized as an Ashoka Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and one of Forbes 30 Social Entrepreneurs Under 30, Eric’s work is driven by a simple belief: For humanity to reach its fullest potential, the place to start is within the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Remembering Board Chair Rik Kranenburg
In January 2020 we were deeply saddened by the loss of our beloved Board Chair Rik Kranenburg. Rik will always be a part of the Educate! family, and we are immensely grateful for his contributions to our mission.
Advisory Boards
Educate! Brain Trust
This advisory group supports the collaborative innovation and development of our new solution for out-of-school youth.
Dedo Baranshamaje, Director of Strategy, Segal Family Foundation
Nadi Albino, Deputy Director of Partnerships and Resources Mobilization, Generation Unlimited
Nancy Taggart, Vice President, Making Cents International; Former Senior Advisor, USAID
Nick Burnett (Chair), Senior Fellow, Results for Development
Nikita Miller Senior Vice President, Head of Product Management & Customer Experience at The Knot Worldwide
Patrick Obonyo, Programme Manager, IKEA Foundation
Paul Atherton, Founder, AI-for-Education.org; Founder, Fab Inc.; Former Education Economist, DFID
Shubha Jayaram, Deputy Director of Strategy, Planning and Management, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Teresa Mbagaya, Investor; Advisor
Xiaoyan Liang, Lead Education Specialist, World Bank