Shaheen Mistri

Shaheen Mistri, born in Mumbai in 1971, is an educator whose work has shaped two of India's better-known education non-profits. She spent her childhood moving between five countries with her father, a Citigroup banker, and returned to Mumbai at eighteen, enrolling at the University of Mumbai rather than continuing abroad. What she saw of the city's slums and of the gap between schools available to rich and poor children set the direction of her career. She graduated in sociology from St Xavier's College, Mumbai, and later took a master's degree from the University of Manchester.

As an undergraduate she began teaching children living on the streets and in slums, and in 1989 opened the first Akanksha centre with fifteen children and college friends as volunteers. That grew into the Akanksha Foundation, which moved from after-school tutoring into running schools in partnership with municipal authorities in Mumbai and Pune; by the accounting on her Wikipedia entry it reaches over 6,500 children through its school project model.

In the summer of 2008 she founded Teach For India, adapting the teaching-fellowship model to Indian conditions: graduates and young professionals commit two years to teaching full-time in low-income schools, with the intention that they carry on working on educational inequity afterwards. She has led it as chief executive since its founding and remains on the Akanksha board. She wrote about the experiment in Redrawing India: The Teach For India Story (2014). She has been an Ashoka Fellow since 2001, was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2002 and an Asia Society 21 Leader in 2006.[3]