In today's female leaders in education and philanthropy post, I'm delighted to share a recent exchange with Aashti Zaidi Hai, whose journey into education began long before she knew it would become her life's work. As the Founder and CEO of Global Schools Forum , Aashti leads a vibrant community of over 170 organizations across 70 countries, collectively ensuring 132 million children have access to safe, quality education. Her path to this role wasn't accidental, growing up on a university campus with a grandfather who served as both a Member of Parliament during India's independence and Vice Chancellor of prominent universities, education is quite literally "in her DNA," as she puts it.
What struck me most in our conversation, and in previous collaborations, was her unwavering commitment to what she calls a "no logo, no ego" approach to systems change, a philosophy that prioritizes authentic partnership over individual recognition. Having worked across the full spectrum of international development, from research at the American Institutes for Research to philanthropy at the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Aashti brings a rare multi-dimensional perspective to the challenge of scaling educational impact. Her belief that "everything is relational and about people" shines through not just in her collaborative leadership style, but in her approach to bridging the gap between grassroots innovation and systemic change, ensuring that locally-led solutions find pathways to transform entire education systems. Aashti is a Fellow at Forward Institute, an Adviser-in-Residence with LedBy Foundation, and a co-founder of Desi's in Development, a community of South Asians working in social impact in the U.K.
First, just an easy start, it would be great to hear a bit more about how you entered the education space. Was there any pivotal moment that inspired you to invest your time and energy in this area?
I've always wanted to work in social impact, and more specifically in education. My paternal grandfather was deeply involved in politics and in education, serving as Member of Parliament during the birth of independent India, and Vice Chancellor of pre-eminent universities in India focused on educating Muslim youth. I grew up on a university campus my whole life, so I suppose education is in my DNA.
And I've actually never worked in any other sector! After graduating from university in the US, I moved to Washington DC to work for the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a US-based not for profit focused on education research.
Our primary clients were the US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. A notable project was supporting the strengthening of Head Start, Inc., a program providing comprehensive early childhood education. I think that is where my love for the earliest years began. We also worked with private foundations to investigate whether various education reform initiatives were delivering their intended impact.
Whilst at AIR, I attended Georgetown University part-time to get a Masters in Public Policy with a focus on international education, then moved to the World Bank in DC, in what was then known as the Human Development Network. This enabled a transition from predominantly US-focused work to a focus on global education. After a couple of years at the World Bank, I was keen to move back to India: Personally, to be closer to family, and professionally to contribute to strengthening the education system in my home country.
Once back in New Delhi, I joined the Department for International Development (DFID, now FCDO) in their country office in India, managing their education portfolio, one of DFID's largest at the time. A large part of our work was to alongside the World Bank and European Commission, as the three key international development partners in India, supporting the strengthening of primary and secondary education led by the Government of India. My experience at DFID was enormously enriching, as we worked alongside exceptionally capable officers in the Indian Administrative Service.
After close to five years at DFID, I moved into philanthropy at the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) in London, as part of a team investing and building a portfolio in early childhood development. CIFF was among the first global philanthropies to invest heavily in ECD and this was again instrumental in my professional journey.
My experience working across multilateral and bilateral organisations, philanthropy, and in education research set the stage to establish Global Schools Forum in 2017. I saw a disconnect between the work social entrepreneurs were doing on the ground and global and national policy, between public systems and non-state actors, and saw an opportunity to bridge that gap. I wanted to provide education leaders with a safe community for peer learning and to support their organizations in their efforts to scale and partner with governments.
Given the resource constraints most countries face in education, I believed in an all-hands-on-deck approach, bringing the innovation, agility, and financing of the private or non-state sectors to support and strengthen government systems.
Establishing a global network felt like an important way to meaningfully foster community and act as a bridge between the terrific work that locally-led organizations were doing and effecting long term sustainable change in wider education systems.
That's my journey in a nutshell. I've been on the research side, worked for bilateral and multilateral organizations, worked in philanthropy, and now run my own organization. This gives me multiple perspectives on how to improve education systems, in ways that build on the existing ecosystem of local actors in a more sustainable way.
That brings me to the topic of systems change, everybody talks about it, but people define it differently. How does the Global Schools Forum approach systems change?
We’re all familiar with the ‘bad side’ of development, such as organizations and so-called experts helicoptering in with their high overheads to set up two-or three-year projects to solve problems in countries without long-term commitment, trust, or sustainable investment in local communities. When the funding ends, things often revert to the status quo because we haven't changed the underlying conditions.
For us at GSF, taking a systems perspective means starting from the community itself, ensuring solutions respond to community needs while being embedded within the local ecosystem, including government, and in partnership with civil society, parents, private sector, and philanthropy.
A systems solution starts from understanding what you're trying to solve and builds a supply of evidence-based and locally rooted ‘solutions’ whilst simultaneously ensuring there is demand. Does the government actually want or need this programme or intervention? Does the community? Are all stakeholders bought in? Only then can you meaningfully see impact over time.
At GSF, our focus was initially on building a community of mission-aligned locally-led organizations, and bringing them to together to learn and share collectively. After a few years, we realized this only solved part of the challenge. The Impact at Scale Labs was our first effort, alongside our policy work, to think about effecting system wide change and accelerating the scaling of impactful interventions. Our policy work enhances the global debate around public-private collaboration, while our Labs support organizations' scaling journey through an 18-month accelerator program. And our Evidence Hubs and wider capability-building efforts engage our community to co-create usable, practitioner-led knowledge products that build on global evidence and their lived ‘frontline’ experience and expertise.
I'm curious about your reflections on breadth versus depth of impact. There's always this balancing act with growth and quality. What have you learned as you've grown from a smaller to larger network?
Over the last three years, we have roughly tripled our community size to 174 organisations impacting 132 million children across 71 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But as you noted, measuring impact is challenging when you're not directly implementing programmes in schools.
With regards to measuring impact, we have different approaches based on the different types of support, thus touching on your point about depth versus breadth. For community-wide learning, study tours, annual meetings, communities of practice, we measure participation rates, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and the likelihood of practical application. This year, for instance, we have an average NPS score of 70 across our Communities of Practice sessions which have covered a range of areas, including foundational learning, child safeguarding, secondary education, and monitoring, evaluation & learning. 85 percent of attendees also shared that they will implement learnings from our sessions in their work. But it’s important to note that these results are self-reported and at best indirect measures of impact.
Through programs like Impact at Scale Labs, where we work closely with organizations for 12-18 months, we measure impact more directly including additional children reached meaningful impact on learning outcomes, the advancement of partnership approaches and the identification of follow-on funding. The labs are about scaling both reach and impact, ensuring organizations can accelerate their scaling pathway with follow-on funding identified. Our first Impact at Scale Lab focused on learning recovery post-COVID and supported organisations to grow their reach from just under 2,500 students to over 31,000 students over the course of our support.
Policy work is probably most challenging to measure because it's about changing conversations, shifting perspectives, and engaging policymakers, hence longer-term work and hence challenging to make causal links
Where do you see key partnerships happening in your programs, and how do you see intermediary organizations evolving?
Collaboration and partnership is core to GSF’s DNA; we rarely do things alone. Even our communities of practice are built on member demand, crafted in partnership with the community from design through delivery.
We also never work bilaterally with government. We typically do not have boots on the ground, and would engage and lean heavily on our members, who work with, understand the context, and have deep relationships in their countries.
Kenya is a good example. Our Impact at Scale Lab - Early Years in Kenya includes four locally-led grantees providing ECD services. Since ECD is devolved to the county level, our Programme Lead, who is based in country, engages and works alongside the grantees closely. As a result of this, two grantees have signed MOUs with county governments, and one with a national government department, but the organizations are always in the driver's seat.
From the outset, we designed the Kenya Lab with close engagement from county-level and national government representatives to understand challenges. Government was a key stakeholder from day one, but our support goes to the four organizations, helping them navigate, strengthen, and unblock challenges to unlock scaling pathways more quickly.
What are in your view key factors for effective partnerships?
I’ll speak a little to how we approach partnerships in our Impact at Labs programme.
First, always design programs with key stakeholders from the outset, including government and the organizations themselves. We identify the three or four challenges where we can be most instrumental over 18 months.
Second, don't try to do too much. These are busy organizations with hundreds of competing priorities. That’s why we embed our program into their existing infrastructure rather than layering additional complexity.
Rather than offering ten things, we use a diagnostic process where the organizations are in the driving seat, and decide on two to three focus areas for their programme, and decisions are be built on trust and meaningful partnership.
Critically, when engaging with government, we cultivate relationships at all levels. This means, not just with high-level officials , but also with civil servants who are the technical experts managing the system day-to-day. That's a third point.
How do you manage the difficult intermediary position between funder pressures for specific results and avoiding overburdening partners? Where do you see the role of intermediaries in education's near future?
Intermediaries, whether national, regional, or global, have an important role to play. I continue championing networks of all types and size.
COVID-19 was a watershed moment that highlighted both the fragility and resilience of education systems worldwide and the vital importance of networks. For our network, it accelerated innovation in ways we never expected. Organizations that had been hesitant about technology suddenly became digital pioneers out of necessity.
What struck me most was how our South-to-South learning became even more valuable. Organizations in countries that had experienced previous crises, like those in parts of Africa or conflict-affected regions, had developed continuity strategies that proved invaluable to others facing school closures for the first time.
The pandemic also reinforced our belief in the importance of locally-led solutions. International organizations struggled to pivot quickly, but our community members, being embedded in their communities, could adapt immediately to serve families' most urgent needs, whether that was providing meals, psychosocial support, or innovative distance learning solutions.
It's also made funders more aware of the value of networks and intermediaries. When travel was impossible and direct oversight became challenging, having trusted intermediaries with existing relationships became crucial for maintaining program continuity.
We've worked hard in our first three to four years to build trust, shared values, and mission alignment with our community. And we see the results; every year in our annual community survey, the consistent feedback is how much members value being part of the community. When GSF members meet each other, there is a sense of trust and camaraderie where they immediately feel they can ask others "How did you do this?" or "Can you share your safeguarding policy?" Networks and intermediaries have important roles supporting and connecting local actors, enabling them to be stronger so they can more meaningfully do their work.
That continues being a key driver for GSF. How can we best ensure these organizations do meaningful work, really ensuring every child has access to safe, quality education so they can fulfill their potential?
As we move into higher-touch programs like the Labs, we are beholden to funders to deliver agreed outputs and outcomes, which are typically agreed through a two-way conversation and dialogue. Some funders are comfortable that we're not on the ground delivering programmes directly, and recognize the value of cultivating community and cohorts that learn together, Others don't understand intermediaries and networks, and may prefer working directly with implementing organizations.
How would you describe your leadership style and whether being a woman has influenced it? As a young woman entering this space, I would have loved mentoring support that was sometimes missing.
One thing I've always held as a core personal value is that everything is relational and about people. Regardless of position, role, or seniority level, from my first job through to today, I believe connection, respect, and humility are fundamental to everything.
I'm very also collaborative, I like working in collaboration with others. Sometimes that means things take longer, but partnership and collaboration are key to my leadership style. I enjoy working closely with people toward shared goals, having fun, and building culture through kindness, humility, and respect.
Another piece of my leadership style is ensuring a focus on organizational culture. Though everyone is virtual at GSF, dialing in from various countries across Asia, Africa and the UK, which makes culture-building more challenging, we try nurturing a culture centered on our values of collaboration, intentional inclusivity, continual learning and transparency. Alongside that, we balance that with fun, with making sure everyone feels listened to, psychologically safe and valued.
One of our members who has achieved very meaningful scale in partnership with government said something that stuck with me: He said they take a "no logo, no ego" approach, meaning they don't care about putting their name on any documents, branding or textbooks. For them, it's about the actual mission. For me, that same level of humility and mission-orientation is how I think about GSF’s role in the sector.
Finally, the value of mentorship. Quite a few young professionals or individuals considering a switch in their career to social impact, and coincidentally mostly women, reach out to me for advice on navigating the development and international education sectors. I'll always have those conversations, because it was so instrumental in my own career. Even a half-hour conversation where someone can share their questions, challenges or aspirations can be helpful. It’s not that I always have the wisest words, but rather I believe in holding the space to listen, sharing experiences and providing any advice or connections where helpful.
Any final thoughts or wishes for the broader education field for the next decades?
Given the uncertain and challenging times we are in, I have three wishes for the education sector:
First, ensuring that children are safe and able to access quality education. We as a community and sector need to sing from a shared song sheet and to continue beat the drum about the importance of investing in education's value, and not getting caught up in FLN (foundational literacy and numeracy) versus SEL (social and emotional learning) versus ECD (early childhood development) but thinking about the sector holistically and ensuring we prioritize the vital need for all children to access quality education.
We are seeing increasing conflict and displacement, so making sure that even where families are displaced and facing conflict, children are safe, protected, and able to access learning opportunities. I hope we can ensure that remains a priority.
Second, thinking about AI and tech's power and leveraging it meaningfully, but in ways that don't exacerbate existing system inequities. We need to design products from the outset ensuring no one gets left behind, because there's already so much inequity. Using tech as a force for good to narrow existing gaps is key.
Third, really leveraging networks because now more than ever, we need better coordination, collaboration, and partnership. Organizations like ours are well-placed to facilitate coalitions and coordination so people aren't replicating ideas but working together more meaningfully, not in isolated silos but building solutions together.