Our Advisors
We have recently launched our dynamic Advisory Council, with experts spanning different industries of education, design and technology with a collective experience of 80+ years and across every continent on the planet. Our graduates get the exclusive opportunity to interact with them.
Roshan Paul, Co-Founder and CEO,
Amani Institute (Global)
Roshan Paul has spent his life questioning the status quo, and built a career around connecting global citizens to solve social problems across boundaries. He co-founded Amani Institute in 2011, post a decade at Ashoka including for Ashoka’s Peace Initiative (supporting social entrepreneurs in conflict zones) and the Globalizer program (helping social entrepreneurs scale up their innovations). He has a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School; a Bachelor’s in International Political Economy from Davidson College (a degree he self-designed), and a certificate in Creative Leadership as one of the founding participants of THNK: The Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership.
Roshan has guest-lectured at 50+ universities and other institutions around the world, including Harvard, Georgetown, and the World Bank. He has been awarded a Leadership in Education award by the World Education Congress, and was named one of the Asia Society’s “Asia 21 Young Leaders” in 2018. He is the author of two books: ‘Such a Lot of World‘, a novel, and ‘Your Work Begins at No’, a collection of essays on social impact education.
He delivered the Commencement (graduation) speech at the University of San Diego in May 2015 and TEDx talks at TEDxAmsterdamEd and TEDxBangaloreSalon. His writing has been published in Forbes, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, MIT’s Innovations Journal, India Today, and the India Development Review. He has been interviewed in The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Forbes, and CNBC Africa.
Aape Pohivarta, President and Founder,
Funzi (Finland)
Aape Pohjavirta is the President and Founder of Funzi, a mobile learning service. Funzi gives the world’s billions of mobile users access to motivating and useful learning. An opportunity to develop skills to build a better tomorrow. High quality, relevant courses delivered with a combination of an effective pedagogy and an engaging experience
Aape is also a passionate entrepreneurship coach and a frequent lecturer in universities, incubation and acceleration programs, and other institutions.
Aape Pohjavirta has worked with digital since 1988 and in the mobile industry since 1997 in various management roles and has a solid track record of international business, product, and technology development including Exomi Ltd., C&M Capital, Sofi Securities, Vineyard Ltd., Brossco Systems, and People Group. Aape is an Apple Achiever, an international patent inventor, and an inspirational public speaker.
Dr. Sunita Swaraj, Principal,
The Heritage School Vasant Kunj (India)
Dr. Sunita Swaraj is an erudite visionary and an adept educationist. With more than two decades of teaching and administrative experience, she continues with her journey of being a catalyst of change in the lives of youth through education. She has received several accolades including the prestigious Socrates Award by Oxford,UK. An alumni of Harvard Business School, she firmly believes in bringing autonomy in learning.
As the Principal at The Heritage School she embraces the vision of creating a student led boutique school. She initiated the Community outreach projects which have helped the underprivileged of Vasant Kunj Bastis, creating a nexus between the haves and the have not’s, through joy of giving weeks, cleanliness drives, blanket drives, bucket challenge to gather resources. She has worked tirelessly to promote functional literacy for both parents and students coming from the EWS category in the school. She pioneered drama in learning project wherein every educator in the campus was trained to be a drama specialist to increase engagement in the classes.
Ilaina Rabbat, Co-founder and Executive Director,
Amani Institute (Global)
For as long as she can remember, Ilaina has been working actively towards social change. Ilaina started her career at the United Nations Argentine Youth Organization in Argentina. When she was only 19 years old, she moved to Spain to work in the International Cooperation Department of the Youth Council of Galicia-Spain, supporting relations with the European Union. Since then, and consistent with her passion for education, innovation and learning from other cultures, she has worked on community-based projects in Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Haiti. Ilaina was an advisor to the Open Society Foundation and also worked at Ashoka, a global organization that identifies and invests in leading social entrepreneurs for seven years. There, she held several positions: Director of a youth program in Buenos Aires; Global Campaigns Manager in Washington DC.; Leader of the expansion of Ashoka in Central America; and as a consultant in the creation of the ecosystem of young social entrepreneurs in Kenya. In 2011, Ilaina co-founded Amani Institute, an organization that is developing a new generation of professionals to create social impact.
Ilaina has two Master’s degrees: one in International Studies and Peace and Conflict Resolution from Torcuato Di Tella University (Argentina) and one in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania (United States).