Panel -- Educational Reform: Closing the Skill Gap

Nyagaka Ongeri is a Managing Director and Head of the Financial Institutions Debt Capital Markets Group at Barclays Capital. He joined Barclays Capital in 2001 focused on growing Barclays’ U.S. presence in the Financial Institutions arena.

Prior to joining Barclays, Nyagaka was a Vice President in JP Morgan’s South African branch where for many years he focused on growing Morgan’s institutional South African presence. Nyagaka joined Morgan in 1997 and was initially responsible for overseeing policies and procedures during the migration of the branch into a fully fledged banking unit.

It was during his time in South Africa that Nyagaka Ongeri, along with Teresa Clarke, founded the Student Sponsorship Program of South Africa (SSP), a non-profit leadership organization that provides scholarships and mentors to over 400 high school students in South Africa. Nyagaka was honored for his role in establishing SSP by being recognized as a recipient of the 2006 Barclays Chairman’s Award.

Nyagaka is a graduate of Howard University where he received a Bachelor of Business Administration (Honors). Nyagaka is also a graduate of Harvard Business School and has successfully completed the CFA examinations.

Nyagaka is an avid mountain climber and marathon runner having recently scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro and Rainier and completed 5 marathons.
 

Fred Swaniker is currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is the Founder & CEO of African Leadership Academy, a world-class, pan-African high school that aims to develop future generations of African leaders. A serial entrepreneur, Fred first had the idea for African Leadership Academy while living in Nigeria in 2003 and realizing the urgent need to increase the supply of effective and ethical leaders for Africa. He brings deep experience launching and managing private educational institutions of excellence in Africa. Fred helped launch and has been a director of Mount Pleasant English Medium School, one of the top-performing private elementary schools in Botswana.

More recently, Fred founded and led the launch of Global Leadership Adventures, a leadership development program for youth throughout the world. In the three years since launch, Global Leadership Adventures has more than doubled its enrolment and expanded to five campuses around the world (Ghana, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Costa Rica.) Fred also gained entrepreneurial experience when he was founding Chief Operating Officer of Synexa Life Sciences, a biotechnology company in Cape Town that today employs 30 South African scientists

Fred brings a unique pan-African perspective to African Leadership Academy. He grew up across the African continent, living in Ghana, the Gambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, and he has lived as an adult in South Africa and Nigeria. During his time as a consultant for McKinsey and Company, Fred provided strategic advice to the management teams of large companies in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Fred holds an MBA degree from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top ten percent of each graduating class. Fred also holds a B.A. degree magna cum laude in economics from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.
 

Jørn Lyseggen, 38, is a Norwegian entrepreneur and patent inventor with four start-ups, two trade sales and one IPO behind him.

In 2001, with a starting capital of only $15,000, Jørn established Meltwater News; a B2B media search engine company offering business intelligence services. Meltwater News has grown to 33 offices, 500 employees, and 10,000 corporate clients across Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the US. From its humble beginnings, Meltwater News has always been profitable and cash flow positive.  The company has grown organically, without debts or external funding.

Jørn identifies the company’s ability to see and develop peoples’ potential as the main reason for Meltwater News’ global success.

Through the creation of Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana, Jørn will apply Meltwater’s unique ability to develop young talent in a not for profit technology and business training institute. MEST gives its trainees the tools they need to start new software companies, generating job opportunities and wealth on a local level.

Jørn hopes successful African software start-ups with origins from MEST will inspire entrepreneurial individuals all over Africa to ultimately create a prosperous African technology industry.

Stacey Childress is a Lecturer in the General Management unit at Harvard Business School, and a co-founder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. She teaches in the School’s MBA and executive education programs. Stacey studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. This includes the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. She is also interested in a range of social enterprise topics, including international social entrepreneurship.

Prior to joining the faculty, Stacey served four years as Executive Director of the Social Enterprise Initiative (SEI) at Harvard Business School, the School’s effort to generate and share knowledge to help individuals and organizations deliver social value through the nonprofit, private, and public sectors.

Before working in academia, Stacey was co-founder of an enterprise software company and was responsible for generating the company’s first revenues. She also spent ten years in the electronic security industry in sales and general management, where as a regional general manager she successfully led the sales and operations functions of six offices across four states. She went on to launch a corporate university for her company, serving 12,000 employees in 148 offices nationwide. During this project, Stacey was involved in crafting public-private partnerships with state and local governments in conjunction with welfare-to-work job training initiatives.

Early in her career, Stacey taught in a Texas public high school. She is a graduate of Baylor University and Harvard Business School, where she was the first woman in school history to be elected by her classmates to deliver the Class Day graduation address.