Erin Ganju

Erin Keown Ganju is an American social entrepreneur who co-founded Room to Read, the children's literacy and girls' education organisation whose Indian programme is one of its largest. She read international relations and economics at Johns Hopkins University and worked at Goldman Sachs, Unilever and several technology start-ups, spending a good deal of that time living and working in Asia, before leaving the private sector for development work.

Room to Read was launched in 1999–2000 by John Wood, Ganju and Dinesh Shrestha, after Wood found schools in rural Nepal with enthusiastic teachers and almost no books. Ganju's part was the operating machinery: from the start-up years she worked on designing a model of school libraries, local-language publishing and long-term support for girls' secondary education that could be replicated country by country rather than rebuilt each time. In 2001 she opened the organisation's Vietnam programme. She became chief operating officer and then, in 2009, chief executive, running operations in fifteen countries, a technical assistance unit called Room to Read Accelerator, fundraising offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia-Pacific, and a staff of more than 1,600. She is now an emeritus board member.

Under her leadership Room to Read received the United States Library of Congress Literacy Award (David M. Rubenstein Prize), the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy in 2011 and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. She was named a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum in 2014 and received the Women's Bond Club Isabel Benham Award the same year, and was one of Fast Company's Extraordinary Women in 2012. She co-wrote Scaling Global Change: A Social Entrepreneur's Guide to Surviving the Start-up Phase and Driving Impact with Cory Heyman, using Room to Read as the case study. She subsequently served as managing director of Echidna Giving, a private funder devoted to girls' education in lower-income countries.[2][3][4][5]