In this edition of female leaders in education and philanthropy, I’m honored to share a conversation with Romana Shaikh, a global education leader, author, and presence-oriented facilitator whose work sits at the intersection of healing, justice, and learning. As co-founder of Kizazi, Romana has led the creation of education models that are deeply rooted in local context, culture, and identity across Armenia, Sierra Leone, and India. With two decades of experience spanning education, mental health, peacebuilding, and leadership development, she brings a rare integration of systemic insight and embodied wisdom. A Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow, Teach For India alum, and teaching assistant in Presence Oriented Psychotherapy, Romana’s newest endeavor, Weaving Wholeness, invites us to reimagine collective leadership as a practice of healing across generations, shifting power, and reclaiming truth.
In our conversation, Romana reflects on the privilege of English fluency, the reckoning that followed the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and why real systems change begins with inner work. She challenges us to ask what we’re not seeing in education, and what we’re systematically erasing.
You can order her book Weaving Wholeness here, and further information on Romana here.
Romana, thank you so much for joining this conversation. To begin with, how did you first enter the field of education? And how has your understanding of it evolved over time?
Thank you. My entry into education came out of necessity. I was fifteen when I began working to support my family during a financial crisis. One of my first jobs was teaching English. In India, we have these crash courses, “Learn English in 30 Days”, usually for working professionals. At the time, I didn’t realize how much privilege I had simply by having studied in English. I was the second generation in my family to be educated in the language.
There I was, a teenage girl teaching people older than me, people who needed English to move forward at work or fit into a social class. At the time, it felt like a job. But in hindsight, it was my first real encounter with how privilege and adversity intersect in shaping access to opportunity.
Throughout university, I continued working, such as tutoring, coaching basketball, and doing some media work. Then in 2008, during my final year of college, the Mumbai terrorist attacks happened. The city went into lockdown. The attackers were young Muslim men, between sixteen and eighteen. Almost instantly, the public narrative turned hostile. As a Muslim woman, I was stunned by how quickly people around me began to generalize and stigmatize an entire community.
It was a personal reckoning. I found myself asking what happens in a young person’s life to make them believe violence is justified. Why don’t we ask that question more seriously? Why do we so easily forget one another’s humanity? That moment made me look at education differently, not just as a tool for knowledge, but as something deeply connected to identity, belief systems, and belonging.
That was the mindset I brought into the Teach For India fellowship, which had just launched. I wasn’t only interested in classroom instruction. I wanted to understand what kind of education shapes people’s worldviews, and how we can create learning environments that build more just, inclusive societies.
Over time, through my work at Teach For India and later through Kizazi, I saw a pattern across countries. Despite cultural differences, most classrooms looked the same, namely teacher-led, exam-focused, and disconnected from children’s lived experiences. Outside of school, children and communities were full of culture, complexity, and wisdom. Inside school, they were expected to conform to a narrow model of success rooted in colonial and industrial logic.
That realization pushed me to start asking: what are we not seeing in education? And what are we systematically erasing? Over time, I came to believe we’re failing to see the whole child, and in doing so, we’re failing to serve them.
Tell me more about your work with Kizazi. How did that experience shape your next steps as an author and community builder?
When Nick Canning and I started Kizazi, we were asking how to make education transformation systemic rather than individual. We had seen incredible change at the classroom level, but it often stayed isolated. We wanted to ask: what if the school itself became the unit of change? And what if schools centered the whole child, not just their academic needs, but their emotional, physical, and spiritual development?
We focused on public schools and partnered with locally rooted NGOs in Armenia, Sierra Leone, and India. Our approach was never to bring in a fixed model, but to work with communities to understand their context, needs, and aspirations. From there, we would co-create what we called breakthrough school models.
In Armenia, the focus was on restoring agency to young people. The traditional system was hierarchical and compliance-based. The schools we worked with wanted children to develop self-belief and entrepreneurial mindsets. So we helped design pedagogies that emphasized discovery, creativity, and student-led learning.
In Sierra Leone, we focused on girls’ empowerment. Instead of a formal program, we invited mothers to lead Saturday sessions with girls. These became spaces for storytelling, wisdom-sharing, and intergenerational connection. It shifted the definition of who holds knowledge, and what it means to teach.
Across all contexts, our guiding question was: what is the purpose of education here? From that, we redesigned everything, curriculum, pedagogy, assessments, leadership, and culture. And perhaps most importantly, we expanded the definition of who educates a child. Teachers, yes, but also families, elders, peers. Education became a collective process.
And that led you into writing your book “Weaving Wholeness”. What was the impetus for putting it all together in that form?
The book came from a desire to name the deeper patterns I had been seeing. There were so many conversations about improving learning outcomes or innovating in pedagogy, but not enough about the paradigms underneath. I wanted to ask: what have we inherited in education that we haven’t questioned? How are colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism still shaping how we educate today?
I also realized that for people working across cultures, we often miss how much we don’t know. When we step into a different context without understanding the lived experience of the people there, we risk doing harm, even with the best intentions. The book became a way to reflect on how to partner across difference, and how to ask questions that open up, rather than narrow down, our understanding.
The second motivation was urgency. We’re facing multiple global crises, ecological, social, spiritual. And no one sector can solve them alone. We need to work in ways that are intersectoral, intergenerational, and intercultural. That’s what my book, Weaving Wholeness, invites people into: a global community where we do the inner work required to transform the systems we’re part of.
You mentioned inner leadership. Can you say more about how you see the connection between inner transformation and systemic change?
I believe systems don’t change unless people change. And people don’t change unless they do the inner work to understand their own worldview, their assumptions, their power.
It’s not just about self-awareness. It’s about noticing how we show up in decision-making, how we hold relationships, how we manage conflict or uncertainty. All of those behaviors are influenced by our internal landscape. If we don’t attend to that, we end up replicating the very systems we’re trying to dismantle.
We have been raised in a certain paradigm where competition, material success, individualism are the underlying beliefs and so we have designed systems that perpetuate this. Inner work is about recognizing how we as adults, in the positions of power we hold are continuing to make decisions that hold up exclusionary ways of the world.
But this isn’t solo work. It needs to happen in community. There are many lived experiences that we don’t know of today because of how our society and systems have separated people along the lines of identity. We need spaces where we can reflect together, challenge each other, and grow with care and honesty.
That’s what I’m building now, spaces where we can wrestle with these questions, lean into each others experiences of oppression and exclusion and from there, redesign how we lead and work.
Let’s talk about something many leaders wrestle with: balancing deep local work with broader global impact. How do you think about the tension between depth and breadth?
This is one of the most persistent tensions in our field. Deep change often happens at a small scale, within relationships and trust. But if we want to influence systems, we have to think about scale. The problem is that when people try to scale by replicating a model with approaches taken from the business world, it often becomes disconnected from context. It loses its soul.
At Kizazi, we tried to approach scale differently. Instead of pushing a single model, we focused on influencing mindsets and enabling people to lead the change thy want for themselves. We showed what was possible in one place and invited others to adapt, not adopt. Our goal was never to create a global network of identical schools. It was to create a ripple effect in how people think about education. To invite the possibility that education can be contextualized and responsive to the needs of each child and every child.
The way to do that, I believe, is through partnerships. Real, long-term, rooted relationships. That includes governments, funders, local NGOs, and communities working together in relationships of shared power. It requires humility, adaptability, and trust. In Armenia and Sierra Leone, we worked closely with local partners and ministries to co-create change, not deliver it.
This kind of scale doesn’t come from growth metrics. It comes from resonance, when people see something, feel moved by it, and adapt it in their own way. That’s the kind of impact I believe in. One that respects difference, builds solidarity, and grows organically.
One last question to close: in the face of all the complexity you’ve named, what gives you hope?
What gives me hope is that this work of transformation already exists.
People everywhere are reclaiming old ways of knowing, reconnecting with community, imagining different futures. I’ve seen it in mothers in Sierra Leone, teachers in Armenia, and young people across India. There is so much wisdom and creativity already in the world. We just need to create space for different people to lead.
I’m also hopeful because I see more and more people willing to do the inner work, to challenge the status quo, the existing norms of the system. People who are asking different questions, showing up differently, listening more deeply.
That gives me faith that the next generation of leaders will not just be smarter, but more whole.
Romana, thank you. This has been such a rich and expansive conversation.
Thank you. I’m grateful for the space. Conversations like this remind me of how powerful it is when we slow down and really reflect together.
That’s where change begins.