In today’s PurposePhil Pulse edition on female leaders in education and philanthropy, I am delighted to share my recent exchange with Dr. Randa (Grob) Zakhary , Founder and CEO of Education.org.
Randa’s career spans medicine, neuroscience, consulting, philanthropy, and global education leadership. What struck me in our conversation is how she weaves those diverse experiences into a clear vision: closing the “last mile” between knowledge and action in education systems. She speaks with candor about what counts as evidence, why systems change must be rooted in people and processes rather than abstract concepts, and how partnerships built on trust, translation, and traction can enable sustainable reform.
Her reflections also reveal a deeply personal leadership philosophy, shaped by her journey as a surgeon, consultant, CEO, mother, and often the only brown woman in male-dominated spaces. Randa’s clarity, her conviction that the right questions are as important as the right answers, and her optimism about building more equitable education systems are both inspiring and practical. To experience this focus on practicality for yourself, consider joining Education.org’s upcoming webinar – co-hosted by UNICEF - to launch guidance on supporting children to transition from non-formal to formal education.
I left this conversation with renewed hope that even in challenging times, we can strengthen systems to ensure every child benefits from what we already know.
Thank you for being here, Randa. I’m excited to have this conversation with you. To start, can you tell me more about your role and the mission of your organization?
Thank you for inviting me, Nora. I’m the founder and CEO of Education.org, a global nonprofit dedicated to closing what we call the “last mile” between knowing and doing in education.
By that I mean ensuring that insights, whether generated through research or lived experience in classrooms, are actually used to shape decisions about children’s lives and learning outcomes. Too often, knowledge exists but doesn’t reach the policymakers who set national strategies or decide on funding. Our role is to bridge that gap.
Too often, knowledge exists but doesn’t reach the policymakers who set national strategies or decide on funding. Our role is to bridge that gap.
We’re not implementers ourselves. Instead, we work as intermediaries, synthesizing evidence and translating it into formats that ministries and policy teams can use in their daily decision-making. Everything begins with the needs of the end user: ministers, directors of policy, and technical teams who must make choices within political cycles and tight timelines.
This matters because in many countries, national strategies and guidelines determine funding flows. They can unlock excellent programs or prevent them from spreading. By strengthening the use of evidence in these system-level choices, we can make sure good ideas actually benefit the children they’re meant for.
To give a few examples: in Sierra Leone we supported the Ministry to develop national accelerated education guidelines, setting the standards for programs that reach more than half a million out-of-school children and youth. In Kenya, we’ve been helping the Ministry strengthen its out-of-school strategy. And in the coming weeks, we’ll be launching new work on transitions, making sure that children moving from non-formal or alternative education can successfully re-enter school or transition into training.
So overall, our mission is to address a double challenge: there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that goes unused, while at the same time system leaders often lack the processes, infrastructure, or culture that would allow them to use evidence quickly and effectively. Our work is about closing that last mile so insights don’t just sit on shelves but actually reach the children who need them most.
Thank you for sharing that. A quick follow-up on evidence, because there’s been a lot of discussion about what actually counts as evidence. What does it mean in your work, and how do you make sure it’s relevant for the stakeholders you mentioned?
That’s a great question, because the definition of evidence has been central to our work. Academic research, published in peer-reviewed journals, is critical and always will be. But a huge amount of valuable knowledge from the frontlines never makes its way into journals.
Our own analysis shows that about 80 percent of valuable evidence in education isn’t peer-reviewed or published in journals. That means we’re missing many voices and experiences that could shape better practice.
Our own analysis shows that about 80 percent of valuable evidence in education isn’t peer-reviewed or published in journals. That means we’re missing many voices and experiences that could shape better practice. So we don’t define evidence narrowly. Instead, we developed a set of standards for appraising it. Contextual relevance and rigor are our highest principles. Evidence must be rigorously developed if it is to hold value for decision-making, but rigor can be found in many forms beyond traditional research.
To support this, we convened the International Working Group to Widen the Evidence Base in Education, which includes members from the The World Bank, the Gates Foundation, UNESCO, the Global Partnership for Education, and others. Together, we’ve developed guidance to help the sector embrace a wider range of evidence without sacrificing rigor.
This is why ministries tell us our work feels different. It’s actionable, practical, and grounded in their realities. It speaks to what is feasible in their context and helps spread good practices more quickly, while limiting the spread of practices that are less effective.
You’ve said your work is about closing the last mile and connecting different stakeholders around evidence. How do you conceptualize systems change? And where do you see the main barriers, given your role as a connector rather than an implementer?
Systems change is a phrase that can feel abstract or overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. I heard something recently that stayed with me: if you want to help a child, fund a program. If you want to help every child, influence the system.
"If you want to help a child, fund a program. If you want to help every child, influence the system."
Too often, people say systems change is too messy, too intangible, or too slow to measure. That’s not true. It is difficult, but so are many things worth doing.
For us, systems change is not a one-time event but a shift in how a system learns, adapts, and delivers. We don’t begin by saying, “Let’s change the system.” We begin with a pressing issue, like out-of-school children, or transitions from non-formal to formal education. That starting point may lead to national guidelines or policy reforms, but the real change comes through the process itself: government-led, partner-aligned, and grounded in shared evidence.
Take Sierra Leone. I mentioned the accelerated education guidelines earlier. The guidelines matter, but the deeper impact came from the way they were developed: a process involving the Ministry’s core leadership team, delivery units, local officials, and implementing partners at both national and local levels. That collaborative process is what makes systems change real.
At its core, systems change is about working with people. Ministries are not abstract entities, they are teams of officials. We usually anchor our work with a principal secretary or Minister, but the real engine is a group of five to ten staff across the education ministry, at different levels of seniority and expertise, sometimes even from outside education, like the ministry of health or finance, which are key for a systemic implementation. This broadens ownership, builds capacity, and reduces vulnerability to political cycles.
We’re also careful not to create parallel structures. Embedding our work into existing sector plans, committees, and processes makes it more resilient.
To make this more concrete, we recently launched the LIFT Fellowship, which stands for Locally Inclusive Framework to Transform Decision-making. It’s both a fellowship and the name of our full work cycle. Our first cohort has been launched in collaboration with Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education. Fellows are ministry staff who already have a role and an interest in strengthening their use of evidence. They serve as bridges between evidence and decision-making at the local level, translating global insights into local practice and elevating local knowledge back into global conversations.
We just inaugurated our first fellows after a co-creation process with ministries. The model is simple but powerful: by embedding individuals who have both technical skill and contextual fluency, we can build day-to-day capacity that endures beyond projects. It’s a small intervention with transformative potential, and we already see high demand from governments for more fellows than we can currently support.
Thank you, that’s very clear. Could you expand on the barriers you see in achieving systems change, and whether partnerships are part of the solution?
Absolutely. One of the biggest barriers we face is that as a sector, we don’t really know what we know, and we certainly don’t use what we know. This is true for unpublished evidence but also for high-quality published research. Too much stays unused, especially at the system level.
There is very little shared infrastructure to support system-wide decision-making. We have excellent actors and researchers generating evidence for individual programs, but far less effort to make guidance usable at the level of national policy, planning, and budgeting.
Our contribution is twofold: first, to synthesize and translate knowledge into actionable guidance; and second, to work on shifting evidence culture, because even the best analysis won’t stick if the culture does not support its use.
And this is where partnerships come in. Over time, we’ve learned that our partnerships work because of what I call the three Ts: trust, translation, and traction.
Trust is built through co-creation, credibility, and consistency. Governments know we show up, deliver, and align with their priorities. Because we don’t fund governments or push specific interventions, they also know our agenda is their agenda.
Translation is about turning complex knowledge into decision-ready guidance that is relevant and timely. In education, we’re not yet as strong as other fields like health or business at knowledge translation. Too often our syntheses stop at summarizing findings, without answering the “so what.” Ministries tell us our work speaks to them differently because it gives them practical guidance they can use immediately.
And then there is traction. We focus on aligning the right actors so that evidence gets embedded into national strategies and implemented locally. We’re not in classrooms ourselves, but by connecting researchers, policymakers, and implementers, we can help evidence travel the last mile.
Together, trust, translation, and traction create conditions for sustainable change.
I find that very compelling. One additional question, because you spoke about translation of knowledge. Where do you see AI fitting into this?
We’ve been testing AI across our process and see huge potential. It can transform how we identify and collect evidence, how we analyze it, and how we package it for decision-makers. It can also support user engagement through tools like chatbots tailored to policymakers’ needs.
Our main focus so far has been at the front end, where the work is most labor-intensive. Identifying and analyzing unpublished evidence has required enormous manual effort. AI can help us accelerate that process, especially when combined with the appraisal framework we developed for unpublished work.
We’ve also begun experimenting with AI for translation products, like interactive tools on our website. But while this is useful, the real bottleneck is still at the beginning of the process. That’s where AI can have the biggest impact.
That said, we are very conscious of the risks. The most important factor in evidence uptake is culture, and AI cannot substitute for human-to-human engagement. We measure our results not by the number of products we create but by how much they are used. So AI should remove the rote work and free up more space for the human relationships that are necessary for uptake.
Thank you for that perspective. Let’s return to the question of systems change. Many people point to the balance between breadth and depth of impact. How do you approach this in your work?
That’s a great question. Every country has a national education strategy, often called a sector plan, which guides policy priorities and investments. These plans matter enormously, because they cascade down into programming and budgeting.
For us, the focus has been depth. We are a small and young team, and by working closely with a handful of countries at the level of sector planning and policy, we can enable improvements that affect millions of children.
Depth means building trust, embedding evidence, and ensuring uptake. This takes time and close collaboration with ministries and local partners. We don’t measure ourselves by visibility but by whether evidence is actually being used.
Of course we care about breadth too, and we’re now maturing our model so that through partnerships we can extend more widely. But our approach to scaling is not about replicating everywhere. It’s about aligning with partners who share our values and where our work can add real value.
We also don’t see depth and breadth as sequential. Starting deep allowed us to build a model that now has the potential to spread more broadly, not through direct replication but through alignment and partnership.
Let’s talk about you for a moment. How did you personally come into education, given your background in medicine and neuroscience?
My path has been unexpected but, in retrospect, deeply connected. I trained as a surgeon and completed a PhD in neuroscience. Working in global health, I saw firsthand the cost of failing to use knowledge we already had, and the power of systems that translate evidence into action. That drew me to broader system-level questions.
I joined McKinsey, working in health, pharmaceuticals, and eventually education. Later, I founded an early childhood institute in Switzerland, motivated both by gaps I saw in research translation and by my own experience as a new mother.
From there I became CEO of the LEGO Foundation, where I created its global learning-through-play strategy. Then I led the education portfolio at Porticus, focusing on whole-child development, and later became a Senior Fellow at Brookings, working on social and emotional learning.
I also served on the board of the Global Partnership for Education, representing foundations. Julia Gillard, then chair of the GPE Board, invited me to chair its Strategy and Impact Committee. In that role we oversaw the creation of the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange.
That experience made me realize how deeply education lacked the kind of infrastructure that health takes for granted: dedicated systems and roles for translating knowledge into everyday decisions.
I also saw philanthropists funding research without results or uptake, and grassroots actors generating powerful evidence that remained invisible beyond their communities. That recognition of a systemic gap is what ultimately led me to found Education.org.
You’ve held several leadership roles across very different fields. How would you describe your leadership style, and how has being a woman influenced it?
I would describe my style as strategic, structured, and question-driven. I aim to lead with clarity, direction, and precision. For me, the most powerful lever in leadership is asking the right questions.
Early in my career, I underestimated this. At McKinsey, I learned that a well-framed question is the shortest path to a useful solution. If you get the question right, you’re already most of the way to the answer. This is just as true in our evidence synthesis work today.
Clarity is something I value deeply because I have suffered under ambiguous leaders. Without clarity, even the best teams struggle. That focus partly comes from my surgical training, where clarity and defined roles are non-negotiable, but also from experience in consulting and in leading organizations.
As a younger leader, I sometimes felt pressure to always have an answer, especially from well-meaning male mentors. But I’ve come to see that asking questions is not weakness, it is strength. It creates space for others to contribute and leads to better solutions.
Julia Gillard modeled this beautifully when I worked with her at GPE. She listened genuinely, asked sharp questions, and when the time came, knew how to move a group forward decisively. She showed me that compassion and decisiveness are not opposites.
Being a woman, and often the only brown woman in male-dominated spaces like surgery or consulting, taught me that influence doesn’t always require formal authority. But it did require presence. It also made me more attuned to power dynamics and to who is being heard and who isn’t.
My advice to emerging women leaders is: first, clarity matters. If you get feedback that you’re not clear, learn why and improve. Second, cultural fit is critical. If the culture fits, you will lead and grow. If it doesn’t, don’t blame yourself or try to force it. Go where you are nurtured. And third, which is often overlooked, the choice of life partner is one of the most consequential decisions shaping a woman’s leadership journey. It influences what becomes possible professionally and personally.
Thank you for that reflection. To close, what is your vision for the next decade in education?
We can’t afford not to be hopeful. These are difficult times, but moments of crisis also force us to rethink and improve.
Our ten-year vision is that evidence becomes part of the infrastructure of education systems. Ministries should have the internal capability to ask good questions, access relevant insights, and use them in planning and budgeting. Frontline knowledge should be valued alongside academic research. Policies and programs should be shaped by timely, translated, practical evidence and designed for the hardest-to-reach children, not just the average.
If we achieve this, ministries will make more confident, equity-focused decisions, donors will fund more coherently, and children will learn not by chance or because of a single program, but because their systems are working better, faster, and more fairly.
Despite today’s challenges, demand for this kind of work has never been higher. With aid declining and resources stretched, governments are asking for support to make the most of what they already have. This is exactly the moment to strengthen systems and ensure we use what we know.
We can’t afford not to.